Infusing Emotions into Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: Understanding, Management, and Generation

Shutong Feng, Hsien-chin Lin, Christian Geishauser, Nurul Lubis, Carel van Niekerk, Michael Heck, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Renato Vukovic, Milica Gasic


Abstract
Emotions are indispensable in human communication, but are often overlooked in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) modelling, where the task success is the primary focus. While existing works have explored user emotions or similar concepts in some ToD tasks, none has so far included emotion modelling into a fully-fledged ToD system nor conducted interaction with human or simulated users. In this work, we incorporate emotion into the complete ToD processing loop, involving understanding, management, and generation. To this end, we extend the EmoWOZ dataset (Feng et al., 2022) with system affective behaviour labels. Through interactive experimentation involving both simulated and human users, we demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly enhances the user’s emotional experience as well as the task success.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.60
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
699–717
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.60
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shutong Feng, Hsien-chin Lin, Christian Geishauser, Nurul Lubis, Carel van Niekerk, Michael Heck, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Renato Vukovic, and Milica Gasic. 2024. Infusing Emotions into Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: Understanding, Management, and Generation. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 699–717, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Infusing Emotions into Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: Understanding, Management, and Generation (Feng et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.60.pdf