Related papers: FreezeEmpath: Efficient Training for Empathetic Sp…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating empathic responses in text-based conversations. But, how reliably do they judge the nuances of empathic communication? We investigate this question by comparing how experts, crowdworkers, and…
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…
Learning to converse using only a few examples is a great challenge in conversational AI. The current best conversational models, which are either good chit-chatters (e.g., BlenderBot) or goal-oriented systems (e.g., MinTL), are language…
LLMs promise to overcome limitations of rule-based mental health chatbots through improved natural language capabilities, yet their ability to deliver evidence-based psychological interventions remains largely unverified because evaluations…
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…
Empathy, which is widely used in psychological counselling, is a key trait of everyday human conversations. Equipped with commonsense knowledge, current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on capturing implicit emotion within…
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…
Affect recognition, encompassing emotions, moods, and feelings, plays a pivotal role in human communication. In the realm of conversational artificial intelligence, the ability to discern and respond to human affective cues is a critical…
Customer service is a setting that calls for empathy in live human agent responses. Recent advances have demonstrated how open-domain chatbots can be trained to demonstrate empathy when responding to live human utterances. We show that a…
Access to mental health support remains limited, particularly in marginalized communities where structural and cultural barriers hinder timely care. This paper explores the potential of AI-enabled chatbots as a scalable solution, focusing…
Previous works on emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) follow a two-step paradigm, which can be summarized as first producing context-independent features via fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) and then analyzing contextual…
People have long hoped for a conversational system that can assist in real-life situations, and recent progress on large language models (LLMs) is bringing this idea closer to reality. While LLMs are often impressive in performance, their…
Developing high-performing dialogue systems benefits from the automatic identification of undesirable behaviors in system responses. However, detecting such behaviors remains challenging, as it draws on a breadth of general knowledge and…
The recent release of GPT-4o showcased the potential of end-to-end multimodal models, not just in terms of low latency but also in their ability to understand and generate expressive speech with rich emotions. While the details are unknown…
In the realm of human-AI dialogue, the facilitation of empathetic responses is important. Validation is one of the key communication techniques in psychology, which entails recognizing, understanding, and acknowledging others' emotional…
Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled the development of automated tools that support various domains, including software engineering. However, while NLP and artificial intelligence (AI) research has…
Existing emotion-aware conversational models usually focus on controlling the response contents to align with a specific emotion class, whereas empathy is the ability to understand and concern the feelings and experience of others. Hence,…
With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), investigating if they can surpass humans in areas such as emotion recognition and empathetic responding has become a focal point of research. This paper presents a comprehensive study…
As chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, we often wonder what users perceive as natural and socially accepted manners of interacting with them. Some researchers maintain that humans should avoid engaging in emotional conversations…
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence has resulted in the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capacity to produce text that closely resembles human communication. These models have been seamlessly integrated into…