Enhancing Emotional Support Conversations: A Framework for Dynamic Knowledge Filtering and Persona Extraction

Jiawang Hao, Fang Kong


Abstract
With the growing need for accessible emotional support, conversational agents are being used more frequently to provide empathetic and meaningful interactions. However, many existing dialogue models struggle to interpret user context accurately due to irrelevant or misclassified knowledge, limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose a new framework that dynamically filters relevant commonsense knowledge and extracts personalized information to improve empathetic dialogue generation. We evaluate our framework on the ESConv dataset using extensive automatic and human experiments. The results show that our approach outperforms other models in metrics, demonstrating better coherence, emotional understanding, and response relevance.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.214
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:
3193–3202
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.214/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiawang Hao and Fang Kong. 2025. Enhancing Emotional Support Conversations: A Framework for Dynamic Knowledge Filtering and Persona Extraction. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3193–3202, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Emotional Support Conversations: A Framework for Dynamic Knowledge Filtering and Persona Extraction (Hao & Kong, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.214.pdf