Related papers: When Seekers Are Hard to Help: Evaluating Emotiona…
As emotional support chatbots have recently gained significant traction across both research and industry, a common evaluation strategy has emerged: use help-seeker simulators to interact with supporter chatbots. However, current simulators…
Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs),…
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…
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…
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals' emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to…
Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to…
The integration of emotional support into various conversational scenarios presents profound societal benefits, such as social interactions, mental health counseling, and customer service. However, there are unsolved challenges that hinder…
Emotional Support Conversations (ESC) are crucial for providing empathy, validation, and actionable guidance to individuals in distress. However, existing definitions of the ESC task oversimplify the structure of supportive responses,…
Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose…
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…
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…
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems aim to alleviate users' emotional difficulties and provide long-term, systematic support for emotional well-being. However, most large language model (LLM)-based ESC systems rely on predefined…
Emotional support is a core capability in human-AI interaction, with applications including psychological counseling, role play, and companionship. However, existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) often rely on short, static…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly power mental-health chatbots, yet the field still lacks a scalable, theory-grounded way to decide which model is most effective to deploy. We present ESC-Judge, the first end-to-end evaluation…
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…
Existing user simulators (USs) for task-oriented dialogue systems only model user behaviour on semantic and natural language levels without considering the user persona and emotions. Optimising dialogue systems with generic user policies,…
Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…
Simulation powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a promising method for exploring complex human social behaviors. However, the application of LLMs in simulations presents significant challenges, particularly regarding their…
Providing Emotional Support (ES) to soothe people in emotional distress is an essential capability in social interactions. Most existing researches on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users,…