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Related papers: When Seekers Are Hard to Help: Evaluating Emotiona…

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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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Jen-tse Huang , Man Ho Lam , Eric John Li , Shujie Ren , Wenxuan Wang , Wenxiang Jiao , Zhaopeng Tu , Michael R. Lyu

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems are pivotal in providing empathetic interactions, aiding users through negative emotional states by understanding and addressing their unique experiences. In this paper, we tackle two key…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Zhe Xu , Daoyuan Chen , Jiayi Kuang , Zihao Yi , Yaliang Li , Ying Shen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing conversations and providing emotional support as separate research directions. However, there remains a significant research gap in combining these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Lanlan Qiu , Xiao Pu , Yeqi Feng , Tianxing He

When survival instincts conflict with human welfare, how do Large Language Models (LLMs) make ethical choices? This fundamental tension becomes critical as LLMs integrate into autonomous systems with real-world consequences. We introduce…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alireza Mohamadi , Ali Yavari

Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Yang Deng , Wenxuan Zhang , Yifei Yuan , Wai Lam

Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are post-trained to be helpful assistants -- optimized to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tarek Naous , Philippe Laban , Wei Xu , Jennifer Neville

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable advancements in psychological counseling. However, existing models generally do not explicitly model seekers' emotion shifts across counseling sessions, a core focus in classical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhentao Xia , Yongqi Fan , Yuxiang Chu , Yichao Yin , Liangliang Chen , Tong Ruan , Weiyan Zhang

Emotional support conversation (ESC) helps reduce people's psychological stress and provide emotional value through interactive dialogues. Due to the high cost of crowdsourcing a large ESC corpus, recent attempts use large language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Zhuang Chen , Yaru Cao , Guanqun Bi , Jincenzi Wu , Jinfeng Zhou , Xiyao Xiao , Si Chen , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Task-oriented dialogue systems (TDSs) are assessed mainly in an offline setting or through human evaluation. The evaluation is often limited to single-turn or is very time-intensive. As an alternative, user simulators that mimic user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Weiwei Sun , Shuyu Guo , Shuo Zhang , Pengjie Ren , Zhumin Chen , Maarten de Rijke , Zhaochun Ren

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 2025-08-28 Xiaoyu Wang , Yue Zhao , Qingqing Gu , Zhonglin Jiang , Xiaokai Chen , Yong Chen , Luo Ji

Advancements in audio foundation models (FMs) have fueled interest in end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, but different web interfaces for each system makes it challenging to compare and contrast them effectively. Motivated by this,…

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,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Xiaoyu Zhang , Ruobing Xie , Yougang Lyu , Xin Xin , Pengjie Ren , Mingfei Liang , Bo Zhang , Zhanhui Kang , Maarten de Rijke , Zhaochun Ren

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various information-seeking and reasoning tasks. These computational systems drive state-of-the-art dialogue systems, such as ChatGPT and Bard. They also carry…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Siyuan Brandon Loh , Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar

Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support. \emph{Peer support}, grounded in lived experience, offers a valuable complement to professional care. However,…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Kellie Yu Hui Sim , Roy Ka-Wei Lee , Kenny Tsu Wei Choo

This study focuses on emotion-sensitive spoken dialogue in human-machine speech interaction. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue systems can handle multimodal data, including audio. Recent models have enhanced the…

Sound · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Hongfei Xue , Yuhao Liang , Bingshen Mu , Shiliang Zhang , Mengzhe Chen , Qian Chen , Lei Xie

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising potential in providing empathetic support during interactions. However, their responses often become verbose or overly formulaic, failing to adequately address the diverse emotional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Jing Ye , Lu Xiang , Yaping Zhang , Chengqing Zong

Designing emotionally intelligent conversational systems to provide comfort and advice to people experiencing distress is a compelling area of research. Recently, with advancements in large language models (LLMs), end-to-end dialogue agents…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Chenwei Wan , Matthieu Labeau , Chloé Clavel

Research and development on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) critically depends on sound and reliable evaluation methodologies. However, the interactive nature of these systems poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Nolwenn Bernard , Krisztian Balog

Depressive and anxiety disorders are widespread, necessitating timely identification and management. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential solutions, yet high costs and ethical concerns about training data remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 June M. Liu , Mengxia Gao , Sahand Sabour , Zhuang Chen , Minlie Huang , Tatia M. C. Lee

Emotional support (ES) systems alleviate users' mental distress by generating strategic supportive dialogues based on diverse user situations. However, ES systems are limited in their ability to generate effective ES dialogues that include…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Shi Yin Hong , Uttamasha Oyshi , Quan Mai , Gibson Nkhata , Susan Gauch