Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference

Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Hongyin Tang, Huan Liu, Yanan Cao, Jingang Wang, Weiping Wang


Abstract
Recently, there has been a heightened interest in building chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to emulate human-like qualities in multi-turn conversations. Despite having access to commonsense knowledge to better understand the psychological aspects and causality of dialogue context, even these powerful LLMs struggle to achieve the goals of empathy and emotional support. Current commonsense knowledge derived from dialogue contexts is inherently limited and often fails to adequately anticipate the future course of a dialogue. This lack of foresight can mislead LLMs and hinder their ability to provide effective support. In response to this challenge, we present an innovative framework named Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Knowledge (Sibyl). Designed to concentrate on the immediately succeeding dialogue, this paradigm equips LLMs with the capability to uncover the implicit requirements of the conversation, aiming to elicit more empathetic responses. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating our paradigm for acquiring commonsense knowledge into LLMs comprehensively enhances the quality of their responses.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
123–140
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.10/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Hongyin Tang, Huan Liu, Yanan Cao, Jingang Wang, and Weiping Wang. 2025. Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 123–140, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference (Wang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.10.pdf