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Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to emotional support conversation (ESC). However, complex multi-turn support remains challenging.This is because existing alignment schemes rely on sparse outcome-level signals, thus…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Chenghui Zou , Ning Wang , Tiesunlong Shen , Luwei Xiao , Chuan Ma , Xiangpeng Li , Rui Mao , Erik Cambria

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate the emotional distress of individuals through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have obtained remarkable progress on ESC, most of these studies might not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yue Zhao , Qingqing Gu , Xiaoyu Wang , Teng Chen , Zhonglin Jiang , Yong Chen , Luo Ji

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate individual emotional distress by generating empathetic responses. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively supporting deep contextual understanding. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yanxin Luo , Xiaoyu Zhang , Jing Li , Yan Gao , Donghong Han

Crowdsourced dialogue corpora are usually limited in scale and topic coverage due to the expensive cost of data curation. This would hinder the generalization of downstream dialogue models to open-domain topics. In this work, we leverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Chujie Zheng , Sahand Sabour , Jiaxin Wen , Zheng Zhang , Minlie Huang

Emotion Cause Extraction in Conversations (ECEC) aims to extract the utterances which contain the emotional cause in conversations. Most prior research focuses on modelling conversational contexts with sequential encoding, ignoring the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Dexin Kong , Nan Yu , Yun Yuan , Guohong Fu , Chen Gong

The growing emotional stress in modern society has increased the demand for Emotional Support Conversations (ESC). While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for ESC, they face two key challenges: (1) low strategy selection accuracy,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Weixiang Zhao , Xingyu Sui , Xinyang Han , Yang Deng , Yulin Hu , Jiahe Guo , Libo Qin , Qianyun Du , Shijin Wang , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Emotional Support Conversation requires not only affective expression but also grounded instrumental support to provide trustworthy guidance. However, existing ESC systems and benchmarks largely focus on affective support in text-only…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xingyu Sui , Yanyan Zhao , Yulin Hu , Jiahe Guo , Weixiang Zhao , Bing Qin

The majority of voice-based conversational agents still rely on pause-and-respond turn-taking, leaving interactions sounding stiff and robotic. We present RESPOND (Responsive Engagement Strategy for Predictive Orchestration and Dialogue), a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Meng-Chen Lee , Costas Panay , Javier Hernandez , Sean Andrist , Dan Bohus , Anatoly Churikov , Andrew D. Wilson

Empathetic dialogue requires not only recognizing a user's emotional state but also making strategy-aware, context-sensitive decisions throughout response generation. However, the lack of a comprehensive empathy strategy framework, explicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Hongru Ji , Yuyin Fan , Meng Zhao , Xianghua Li , Lianwei Wu , Chao Gao

A good empathetic dialogue system should first track and understand a user's emotion and then reply with an appropriate emotion. However, current approaches to this task either focus on improving the understanding of users' emotion or on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Yuhan Liu , Jun Gao , Jiachen Du , Lanjun Zhou , Ruifeng Xu

Understanding and predicting the emotional trajectory in multi-party multi-turn conversations is of great significance. Such information can be used, for example, to generate empathetic response in human-machine interaction or to inform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Enas Altarawneh , Ameeta Agrawal , Michael Jenkin , Manos Papagelis

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is a more challenging task than conventional text emotion recognition. It can be regarded as a personalized and interactive emotion recognition task, which is supposed to consider not only the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jiangnan Li , Zheng Lin , Peng Fu , Qingyi Si , Weiping Wang

Automatic psychological counseling requires mass of professional knowledge that can be found in online counseling forums. Motivated by this, we propose K-ESConv, a novel prompt learning based knowledge injection method for emotional support…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Wei Chen , Gang Zhao , Xiaojin Zhang , Xiang Bai , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-18 Chengkun Zeng , Guanyi Chen , Chenghua Lin , Ruizhe Li , Zhigang Chen

How do we communicate with others to achieve our goals? We use our prior experience or advice from others, or construct a candidate utterance by predicting how it will be received. However, our experiences are limited and biased, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Ryan Liu , Howard Yen , Raja Marjieh , Thomas L. Griffiths , Ranjay Krishna

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the generation of emotional support conversations (ESC), offering scalable solutions with reduced costs and enhanced data privacy. This paper explores the role of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Shenghan Wu , Yimo Zhu , Wynne Hsu , Mong-Li Lee , Yang Deng

Intelligent dialogue systems are increasingly deployed in emotionally and ethically sensitive settings, where failures in either emotional attunement or ethical judgment can cause significant harm. Existing dialogue models typically address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Jiawen Deng , Wei Li , Wentao Zhang , Ziyun Jiao , Fuji Ren

Current approaches to empathetic response generation typically encode the entire dialogue history directly and put the output into a decoder to generate friendly feedback. These methods focus on modelling contextual information but neglect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Guoqing Lv , Jiang Li , Xiaoping Wang , Zhigang Zeng

Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-04 Hao Zhou , Minlie Huang , Tianyang Zhang , Xiaoyan Zhu , Bing Liu

Empathetic conversation is a crucial characteristic in daily conversations between individuals. Nowadays, Large Language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance in generating empathetic responses. Knowledge bases like COMET can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Huiying Cao , Yiqun Zhang , Shi Feng , Xiaocui Yang , Daling Wang , Yifei Zhang