CTSM: Combining Trait and State Emotions for Empathetic Response Model

Yufeng Wang, Chao Chen, Zhou Yang, Shuhui Wang, Xiangwen Liao


Abstract
Empathetic response generation endeavors to empower dialogue systems to perceive speakers’ emotions and generate empathetic responses accordingly. Psychological research demonstrates that emotion, as an essential factor in empathy, encompasses trait emotions, which are static and context-independent, and state emotions, which are dynamic and context-dependent. However, previous studies treat them in isolation, leading to insufficient emotional perception of the context, and subsequently, less effective empathetic expression. To address this problem, we propose Combining Trait and State emotions for Empathetic Response Model (CTSM). Specifically, to sufficiently perceive emotions in dialogue, we first construct and encode trait and state emotion embeddings, and then we further enhance emotional perception capability through an emotion guidance module that guides emotion representation. In addition, we propose a cross-contrastive learning decoder to enhance the model’s empathetic expression capability by aligning trait and state emotions between generated responses and contexts. Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate that CTSM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and can generate more empathetic responses. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangyufeng-empty/CTSM
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.376
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4214–4225
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.376
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yufeng Wang, Chao Chen, Zhou Yang, Shuhui Wang, and Xiangwen Liao. 2024. CTSM: Combining Trait and State Emotions for Empathetic Response Model. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4214–4225, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
CTSM: Combining Trait and State Emotions for Empathetic Response Model (Wang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.376.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.376.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.rar