An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation

Zhou Yang, Zhaochun Ren, Wang Yufeng, Haizhou Sun, Chao Chen, Xiaofei Zhu, Xiangwen Liao


Abstract
Empathetic response generation aims to comprehend the cognitive and emotional states in dialogue utterances and generate proper responses. Psychological theories posit that comprehending emotional and cognitive states necessitates iteratively capturing and understanding associated words across dialogue utterances. However, existing approaches regard dialogue utterances as either a long sequence or independent utterances for comprehension, which are prone to overlook the associated words between them. To address this issue, we propose an Iterative Associative Memory Model (IAMM) for empathetic response generation. Specifically, we employ a novel second-order interaction attention mechanism to iteratively capture vital associated words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module (for storing associated words), thereby accurately and nuancedly comprehending the utterances.We conduct experiments on the Empathetic-Dialogue dataset. Both automatic and human evaluations validate the efficacy of the model. Variant experiments on LLMs also demonstrate that attending to associated words improves empathetic comprehension and expression.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.170
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3081–3092
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.170
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.170
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhou Yang, Zhaochun Ren, Wang Yufeng, Haizhou Sun, Chao Chen, Xiaofei Zhu, and Xiangwen Liao. 2024. An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3081–3092, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation (Yang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.170.pdf