# Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.01074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 167 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 167)

- [Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02427/) (2023)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following with Multiple Constraints Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03978/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Controllable Text Generation using Transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05337/) (2022)
- [Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09459/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11584/) (2023)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05719/) (2022)
- [Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12670/) (2024)
- [CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08316/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [One Chatbot Per Person: Creating Personalized Chatbots based on Implicit User Profiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09355/) (2021)
- [PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09235/) (2022)
- [NaturalConv: A Chinese Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-turn Topic-driven Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02548/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Emotional Generation Capability of Large Language Models via Emotional Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06836/) (2024)
- [ConstitutionMaker: Interactively Critiquing Large Language Models by Converting Feedback into Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15428/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08515/) (2021)
- [Meet Your Favorite Character: Open-domain Chatbot Mimicking Fictional Characters with only a Few Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10825/) (2022)
- [TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03296/) (2023)
- [CTRLEval: An Unsupervised Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00862/) (2022)
- [NEWTS: A Corpus for News Topic-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15661/) (2022)
- [CPED: A Large-Scale Chinese Personalized and Emotional Dialogue Dataset for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14727/) (2022)
- [Emotion-aware Chat Machine: Automatic Emotional Response Generation for Human-like Emotional Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03044/) (2021)
- [LLM-based Conversational AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Screening and Psychotherapeutic Intervention via Everyday Smart Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10779/) (2024)
- [EmoWOZ: A Large-Scale Corpus and Labelling Scheme for Emotion Recognition in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04919/) (2021)
- [Why is constrained neural language generation particularly challenging?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05395/) (2022)
- [Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11715/) (2022)
- [CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08845/) (2022)
- [FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00250/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional Chatting Machine (ECM) that can generate appropriate responses not only in content (relevant and grammatical) but also in emotion (emotionally consistent). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the emotion factor in large-scale conversation generation. ECM addresses the factor using three new mechanisms that respectively (1) models the high-level abstraction of emotion expressions by embedding emotion categories, (2) captures the change of implicit internal emotion states, and (3) uses explicit emotion expressions with an external emotion vocabulary. Experiments show that the proposed model can generate responses appropriate not only in content but also in emotion.