From Traits to Empathy: Personality-Aware Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation

Jiaqiang Wu, Xuandong Huang, Zhouan Zhu, Shangfei Wang


Abstract
Empathetic dialogue systems improve user experience across various domains. Existing approaches mainly focus on acquiring affective and cognitive knowledge from text, but neglect the unique personality traits of individuals and the inherently multimodal nature of human face-to-face conversation. To this end, we enhance the dialogue system with the ability to generate empathetic responses from a multimodal perspective, and consider the diverse personality traits of users. We incorporate multimodal data, such as images and texts, to understand the user’s emotional state and situation. Concretely, we first identify the user’s personality trait. Then, the dialogue system comprehends the user’s emotions and situation by the analysis of multimodal inputs. Finally, the response generator models the correlations among the personality, emotion, and multimodal data, to generate empathetic responses. Experiments on the MELD dataset and the MEDIC dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.598
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:
8925–8938
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.598/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaqiang Wu, Xuandong Huang, Zhouan Zhu, and Shangfei Wang. 2025. From Traits to Empathy: Personality-Aware Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8925–8938, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Traits to Empathy: Personality-Aware Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation (Wu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.598.pdf