@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-expressions,
title = "From Expressions to Needs: Hierarchical Interpretive Reasoning for Emotional Support Conversation",
author = "Zhang, Xinjie and
Fan, Haotian and
Huang, Zhaopei and
Ren, Shujie and
Wang, Wenxuan and
Jin, Qin",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1729/",
pages = "39455--39487",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems often react directly to surface-level distress expressions, generating reassurance or advice without adequately modeling the underlying psychological needs driving the distress. However, effective emotional support requires an interpretive process that connects what is expressed with why it is expressed and ultimately what support is needed. We argue that current ESC systems lack such an interpretive layer between observation and supportive intervention. To address this gap, we propose HierINT, a psychologically grounded hierarchical interpretive schema for emotional support conversations. HierINT distinguishes observable communicative intentions from the underlying psychological interpretations that drive them, including cognitive appraisals and unmet fundamental psychological needs. Building on this schema, we construct HierINT-Dlg, a dataset with hierarchical interpretive annotations and need-aligned support strategies. We further propose HierINT-CoRe, a collaborative reasoning framework that operationalizes HierINT by jointly modeling psychological interpretation and support strategy planning prior to response generation. Experiments on ESConv and HierINT-Dlg demonstrate consistent improvements over surface-level and intention-aware baselines, particularly on empowerment and personalization metrics. Our results suggest that effective emotional support requires moving beyond reactive response generation toward psychologically grounded need-informed intervention. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/43zxj/HierINT."
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<abstract>Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems often react directly to surface-level distress expressions, generating reassurance or advice without adequately modeling the underlying psychological needs driving the distress. However, effective emotional support requires an interpretive process that connects what is expressed with why it is expressed and ultimately what support is needed. We argue that current ESC systems lack such an interpretive layer between observation and supportive intervention. To address this gap, we propose HierINT, a psychologically grounded hierarchical interpretive schema for emotional support conversations. HierINT distinguishes observable communicative intentions from the underlying psychological interpretations that drive them, including cognitive appraisals and unmet fundamental psychological needs. Building on this schema, we construct HierINT-Dlg, a dataset with hierarchical interpretive annotations and need-aligned support strategies. We further propose HierINT-CoRe, a collaborative reasoning framework that operationalizes HierINT by jointly modeling psychological interpretation and support strategy planning prior to response generation. Experiments on ESConv and HierINT-Dlg demonstrate consistent improvements over surface-level and intention-aware baselines, particularly on empowerment and personalization metrics. Our results suggest that effective emotional support requires moving beyond reactive response generation toward psychologically grounded need-informed intervention. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/43zxj/HierINT.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T From Expressions to Needs: Hierarchical Interpretive Reasoning for Emotional Support Conversation
%A Zhang, Xinjie
%A Fan, Haotian
%A Huang, Zhaopei
%A Ren, Shujie
%A Wang, Wenxuan
%A Jin, Qin
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F zhang-etal-2026-expressions
%X Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems often react directly to surface-level distress expressions, generating reassurance or advice without adequately modeling the underlying psychological needs driving the distress. However, effective emotional support requires an interpretive process that connects what is expressed with why it is expressed and ultimately what support is needed. We argue that current ESC systems lack such an interpretive layer between observation and supportive intervention. To address this gap, we propose HierINT, a psychologically grounded hierarchical interpretive schema for emotional support conversations. HierINT distinguishes observable communicative intentions from the underlying psychological interpretations that drive them, including cognitive appraisals and unmet fundamental psychological needs. Building on this schema, we construct HierINT-Dlg, a dataset with hierarchical interpretive annotations and need-aligned support strategies. We further propose HierINT-CoRe, a collaborative reasoning framework that operationalizes HierINT by jointly modeling psychological interpretation and support strategy planning prior to response generation. Experiments on ESConv and HierINT-Dlg demonstrate consistent improvements over surface-level and intention-aware baselines, particularly on empowerment and personalization metrics. Our results suggest that effective emotional support requires moving beyond reactive response generation toward psychologically grounded need-informed intervention. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/43zxj/HierINT.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1729/
%P 39455-39487
Markdown (Informal)
[From Expressions to Needs: Hierarchical Interpretive Reasoning for Emotional Support Conversation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1729/) (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL