Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems

Abstract

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 effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains untouched. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory (Hill, 2009). We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ES-Conv in training more emotional support systems 1 .

CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation

“…In the future, our work can inspire other approaches to leverage commonsense knowledge for empathetic response generation and similarly promising tasks (e.g. providing emotional support (Liu et al 2021)).…”

“…Empathy is a desirable trait of human daily conversations that enables individuals to understand, perceive, and respond appropriately to the situation and feelings of others (Keskin 2014). Previous research has demonstrated that empathetic dialogue systems can improve user experience and satisfaction in multiple domains (Fitzpatrick, Darcy, and Vierhile 2017;Liu et al 2021;Wang et al 2021). Hence, it is important to discover ways that allow us to equip open-domain dialogue systems with empathy.…”

A Roadmap for Big Model

“…In that case, they are more prone to provide adequate emotional support to users, such as moderate comforting and reasonable suggestions [1479].…”

“…Emotional Support Dialog Systems. Beyond the trait of being empathetic, advanced dialog systems should also be able to provide effective emotional support for users that are facing ongoing emotional problems [1479]. Emotional support aims at reducing individuals' emotional distress and helping them understand and work through the challenges that they face [1488,1489,1490].…”

“…In the pioneering work [1479] that proposed the task of Emotional Support Conversation (ESC), the authors devise a ESC framework to provide a cautious, yet concrete, step towards developing systems capable of reasonably modest levels of support. An example conversation is shown in Fig.…”