ECC: Synergizing Emotion, Cause and Commonsense for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Xu Wang, Bo Wang, Yihong Tang, Dongming Zhao, Jing Liu, Ruifang He, Yuexian Hou


Abstract
Empathy improves human-machine dialogue systems by enhancing the user’s experience. While traditional models have aimed to detect and express users’ emotions from dialogue history, they neglect the crucial and complex interactions among emotion, emotion causes, and commonsense. To address this, we introduce the ECC (Emotion, Cause, and Commonsense) framework, which leverages specialized encoders to capture the key features of emotion, cause, and commonsense and collaboratively models these through a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder. ECC further employs novel loss functions to refine the interplay of three factors and generates empathetic responses using an energy-based model supported by ODE sampling. Empirical results on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset demonstrate that ECC outperforms existing baselines, offering a robust solution for empathetic dialogue generation.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.367
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:
5475–5485
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.367/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Xu Wang, Bo Wang, Yihong Tang, Dongming Zhao, Jing Liu, Ruifang He, and Yuexian Hou. 2025. ECC: Synergizing Emotion, Cause and Commonsense for Empathetic Dialogue Generation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5475–5485, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ECC: Synergizing Emotion, Cause and Commonsense for Empathetic Dialogue Generation (Wang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.367.pdf