2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDHLT-3.4
Paper Title GENERATING EMPATHETIC RESPONSES BY INJECTING ANTICIPATED EMOTION
Authors Yuhan Liu, Jiachen Du, Xiang Li, Ruifeng Xu, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China
SessionHLT-3: Dialogue Systems 1: General Topics
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Tuesday, 08 June, 14:00 - 14:45
Presentation Time:Tuesday, 08 June, 14:00 - 14:45
Presentation Poster
Topic Human Language Technology: [HLT-DIAL] Discourse and Dialog
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Showing empathy and reacting to users’ feeling are impor-tant social skills for current dialogue generation systems. Inprevious research, empathetic responses are generated by 1)only modeling the emotion of dialogue history or 2) indirectly leveraging the predicted emotion label of responses.In this paper, we propose a novel empathetic response generation method that incorporates the anticipated emotion intoresponse generation by minimizing the divergence betweendistribution of responses’ anticipated emotion and ground-truth emotion. The anticipated emotion is predicted by anauxiliary emotion predictor whose input is the previous ut-terances. Additionally, we treat the generation as delibera-tion process and design a two-round training method to refinethe response iteratively. Experimental results show that theproposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art foremphatic dialogue generation task.