CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation
This work addresses the challenge of improving empathy in dialog systems, which is important for enhancing user interaction, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods by incorporating hierarchical modeling of multiple factors.
The paper tackles the problem of generating empathetic responses in open-domain dialog systems by proposing CoMAE, a multi-factor hierarchical framework that models communication mechanism, dialog act, and emotion. The result is that CoMAE-based models generate more empathetic responses than previous methods, as shown through experiments.
The capacity of empathy is crucial to the success of open-domain dialog systems. Due to its nature of multi-dimensionality, there are various factors that relate to empathy expression, such as communication mechanism, dialog act and emotion. However, existing methods for empathetic response generation usually either consider only one empathy factor or ignore the hierarchical relationships between different factors, leading to a weak ability of empathy modeling. In this paper, we propose a multi-factor hierarchical framework, CoMAE, for empathetic response generation, which models the above three key factors of empathy expression in a hierarchical way. We show experimentally that our CoMAE-based model can generate more empathetic responses than previous methods. We also highlight the importance of hierarchical modeling of different factors through both the empirical analysis on a real-life corpus and the extensive experiments. Our codes and used data are available at https://github.com/chujiezheng/CoMAE.