Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations

Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Lam


Abstract
Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.225
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4079–4095
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.225
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.225
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, and Wai Lam. 2023. Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4079–4095, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations (Deng et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.225.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.225.mp4