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Empathy is a vital factor that contributes to mutual understanding, and joint problem-solving. In recent years, a growing number of studies have recognized the benefits of empathy and started to incorporate empathy in conversational…
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…
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are able to elicit user preferences through multi-turn dialogues. They typically incorporate external knowledge and pre-trained language models to capture the dialogue context. Most CRS approaches,…
Empathy is critical for effective and satisfactory conversational communication. Prior efforts to measure conversational empathy mostly focus on expressed communicative intents -- that is, the way empathy is expressed. Yet, these works…
The novel research area of computational empathy is in its infancy and moving towards developing methods and standards. One major problem is the lack of agreement on the evaluation of empathy in artificial interactive systems. Even though…
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a typical dialogue that can effectively assist the user in mitigating emotional pressures. However, owing to the inherent subjectivity involved in analyzing emotions, current non-artificial…
A key trait of daily conversations between individuals is the ability to express empathy towards others, and exploring ways to implement empathy is a crucial step towards human-like dialogue systems. Previous approaches on this topic mainly…
One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill. While it is straightforward for humans to recognize and acknowledge others' feelings in a…
With the rapid development of Large Language Models, dialogue systems are shifting from information tools to emotional companions, heralding the era of Emotional Companionship Dialogue Systems (ECDs) that provide personalized emotional…
We present metrics for evaluating dialog systems through a psychologically-grounded "human" lens in which conversational agents express a diversity of both states (e.g., emotion) and traits (e.g., personality), just as people do. We present…
This report presents the Empathetic Cascading Networks (ECN) framework, a multi-stage prompting method designed to enhance the empathetic and inclusive capabilities of large language models. ECN employs four stages: Perspective Adoption,…
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…
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…
Evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) anthropomorphic capabilities has become increasingly important in contemporary discourse. Utilizing the emotion appraisal theory from psychology, we propose to evaluate the empathy ability of LLMs,…
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to provide empathetic and effective emotional assistance through dialogue, addressing the growing demand for mental health support. This paper presents our solution for the NLPCC 2025 Task 8 ESC…
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…
Effective feature representations play a critical role in enhancing the performance of text generation models that rely on deep neural networks. However, current approaches suffer from several drawbacks, such as the inability to capture the…
Empathy is critical to successful mental health support. Empathy measurement has predominantly occurred in synchronous, face-to-face settings, and may not translate to asynchronous, text-based contexts. Because millions of people use…
Empathy plays a critical role in software engineering (SE), influencing collaboration, communication, and user-centred design. Although SE research has increasingly recognised empathy as a key human aspect, there remains no validated…
Understanding speaker's feelings and producing appropriate responses with emotion connection is a key communicative skill for empathetic dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a simple technique called Affective Decoding for empathetic…