@inproceedings{heo-etal-2026-stress,
title = "Stress-Testing Emotional Support Models: Moving from Homogeneous to Diverse Help Seekers",
author = "Heo, Chaewon and
Jin, Cheyon and
Jo, Yohan",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1146/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1146",
pages = "22842--22869",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "As emotional support chatbots have recently gained significant traction across both research and industry, a common evaluation strategy has emerged: use help-seeker simulators to interact with supporter chatbots. However, current simulators suffer from two critical limitations: (1) they fail to capture the behavioral diversity of real-world seekers, often portraying them as overly cooperative, and (2) they lack the controllability required to simulate specific seeker profiles. To address these challenges, we present a controllable seeker simulator driven by nine psychological and linguistic features that underpin seeker behavior. Using authentic Reddit conversations, we train our model via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which effectively differentiates diverse seeker behaviors into specialized parameter subspaces, thereby enhancing fine-grained controllability. Our simulator achieves superior profile adherence and behavioral diversity compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, evaluating 7 prominent supporter models with our system uncovers previously obscured performance degradations. These findings underscore the utility of our framework in providing a more faithful and stress-tested evaluation for emotional support chatbots."
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<abstract>As emotional support chatbots have recently gained significant traction across both research and industry, a common evaluation strategy has emerged: use help-seeker simulators to interact with supporter chatbots. However, current simulators suffer from two critical limitations: (1) they fail to capture the behavioral diversity of real-world seekers, often portraying them as overly cooperative, and (2) they lack the controllability required to simulate specific seeker profiles. To address these challenges, we present a controllable seeker simulator driven by nine psychological and linguistic features that underpin seeker behavior. Using authentic Reddit conversations, we train our model via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which effectively differentiates diverse seeker behaviors into specialized parameter subspaces, thereby enhancing fine-grained controllability. Our simulator achieves superior profile adherence and behavioral diversity compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, evaluating 7 prominent supporter models with our system uncovers previously obscured performance degradations. These findings underscore the utility of our framework in providing a more faithful and stress-tested evaluation for emotional support chatbots.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Stress-Testing Emotional Support Models: Moving from Homogeneous to Diverse Help Seekers
%A Heo, Chaewon
%A Jin, Cheyon
%A Jo, Yohan
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F heo-etal-2026-stress
%X As emotional support chatbots have recently gained significant traction across both research and industry, a common evaluation strategy has emerged: use help-seeker simulators to interact with supporter chatbots. However, current simulators suffer from two critical limitations: (1) they fail to capture the behavioral diversity of real-world seekers, often portraying them as overly cooperative, and (2) they lack the controllability required to simulate specific seeker profiles. To address these challenges, we present a controllable seeker simulator driven by nine psychological and linguistic features that underpin seeker behavior. Using authentic Reddit conversations, we train our model via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which effectively differentiates diverse seeker behaviors into specialized parameter subspaces, thereby enhancing fine-grained controllability. Our simulator achieves superior profile adherence and behavioral diversity compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, evaluating 7 prominent supporter models with our system uncovers previously obscured performance degradations. These findings underscore the utility of our framework in providing a more faithful and stress-tested evaluation for emotional support chatbots.
%R 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1146
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1146/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1146
%P 22842-22869
Markdown (Informal)
[Stress-Testing Emotional Support Models: Moving from Homogeneous to Diverse Help Seekers](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1146/) (Heo et al., Findings 2026)
ACL