Related papers: Towards Detecting Need for Empathetic Response in …

Conversational agents are increasingly used as support tools along mental therapeutic pathways with significant societal impacts. In particular, empathy is a key non-functional requirement in therapeutic contexts, yet current chatbot…

It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in…

A recent trend in the domain of open-domain conversational agents is enabling them to converse empathetically to emotional prompts. Current approaches either follow an end-to-end approach or condition the responses on similar emotion labels…

Empathy is fundamental to human interactions, yet it remains unclear whether embodied agents can provide human-like empathetic support. Existing works have studied agents' tasks solving and social interactions abilities, but whether agents…

Depression is a common mental disorder. Automatic depression detection tools using speech, enabled by machine learning, help early screening of depression. This paper addresses two limitations that may hinder the clinical implementations of…

Achieving empathy is a crucial step toward humanized dialogue systems. Current approaches for empathetic dialogue generation mainly perceive an emotional label to generate an empathetic response conditioned on it, which simply treat…

Emotion detection in dialogues is challenging as it often requires the identification of thematic topics underlying a conversation, the relevant commonsense knowledge, and the intricate transition patterns between the affective states. In…

Empathetic dialog generation aims at generating coherent responses following previous dialog turns and, more importantly, showing a sense of caring and a desire to help. Existing models either rely on pre-defined emotion labels to guide the…

We introduce the concept of "empathic grounding" in conversational agents as an extension of Clark's conceptualization of grounding in conversation in which the grounding criterion includes listener empathy for the speaker's affective…

Empathetic response generation is a crucial task for creating more human-like and supportive conversational agents. However, existing methods face a core trade-off between the analytical depth of specialized models and the generative…

Empathy, as defined in behavioral sciences, expresses the ability of human beings to recognize, understand and react to emotions, attitudes and beliefs of others. The lack of an operational definition of empathy makes it difficult to…

Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a…

Empathetic response generation is designed to comprehend the emotions of others and select the most appropriate strategies to assist them in resolving emotional challenges. Empathy can be categorized into cognitive empathy and affective…

Empathetic Conversational Systems (ECS) are built to respond empathetically to the user's emotions and sentiments, regardless of the application domain. Current ECS studies evaluation approaches are restricted to offline evaluation…

In conversation-based psychotherapy, therapists use verbal techniques to help clients express thoughts and feelings, and change behavior. In particular, how well therapists convey empathy is an essential quality index of psychotherapy…

The study of multimodal interaction in therapy can yield a comprehensive understanding of therapist and patient behavior that can be used to develop a multimodal virtual agent supporting therapy. This investigation aims to uncover how…

Measuring empathy in conversation can be challenging, as empathy is a complex and multifaceted psychological construct that involves both cognitive and emotional components. Human evaluations can be subjective, leading to inconsistent…

Empathy is a complex cognitive ability based on the reasoning of others' affective states. In order to better understand others and express stronger empathy in dialogues, we argue that two issues must be tackled at the same time: (i)…

Open-domain conversational agents or chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the natural language processing community. One of the challenges is enabling them to converse in an empathetic manner. Current neural response generation…

Counseling is carried out as spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is considered an important index of the quality of counseling and often assessed by an observer or the client.…