mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot

arXiv 1812.08989 ↗First posted 21 Dec 2018cs.HC cs.AI cs.CLcited by 172

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes the development of Microsoft XiaoIce, the most popular social chatbot in the world. XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an AI companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) in system design, cast human-machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key components including dialogue manager, core chat, skills, and an empathetic computing module. We show how XiaoIce dynamically recognizes human feelings and states, understands user intent, and responds to user needs throughout long conversations. Since her launch in 2014, XiaoIce has communicated with over 660 million active users and succeeded in establishing long-term relationships with many of them. Analysis of large scale online logs shows that XiaoIce has achieved an average CPS of 23, which is significantly higher than that of other chatbots and even human conversations.

Key facts. Cited by 172 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2019: 1; 2020: 2; 2021: 36; 2022: 29; 2023: 37; 2024: 30; 2025: 23; 2026: 14.

172 papers.

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  1. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agentscited by 800
  2. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  3. 2019Way Off-Policy Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning of Implicit Human Preferences in Dialogcited by 283
  4. 2023A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Generated Content (AIGC): A History of Generative AI from GAN to ChatGPTcited by 221
  5. 2022BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engagecited by 197
  6. 2022Pretrained Language Models for Text Generation: A Surveycited by 121
  7. 2022ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agentscited by 109
  8. 2020Human-centric Dialog Training via Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 92
  9. 2023A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?cited by 84
  10. 2021DialogueCRN: Contextual Reasoning Networks for Emotion Recognition in Conversationscited by 71
  11. 2024A Complete Survey on LLM-based AI Chatbotscited by 71
  12. 2020Dialogue Response Ranking Training with Large-Scale Human Feedback Datacited by 68
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  1. 2022Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 56
  2. 2023Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?cited by 54
  3. 2023Leveraging Large Language Models to Power Chatbots for Collecting User Self-Reported Datacited by 48
  4. 2021Biomedical Question Answering: A Survey of Approaches and Challengescited by 46
  5. 2023Faithful Persona-based Conversational Dataset Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 45
  6. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  7. 2024A Full-duplex Speech Dialogue Scheme Based On Large Language Modelscited by 40
  8. 2021One Chatbot Per Person: Creating Personalized Chatbots based on Implicit User Profilescited by 39
  9. 2021PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generationcited by 37
  10. 2023Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systemscited by 37
  11. 2023A Transformer-Based Model With Self-Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversationscited by 37
  12. 2024Large Language Models Produce Responses Perceived to be Empathiccited by 36
  13. 2021ValueNet: A New Dataset for Human Value Driven Dialogue Systemcited by 34
  14. 2021Revealing Persona Biases in Dialogue Systemscited by 33
  15. 2021Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representationcited by 32
  16. 2023Foundation Metrics for Evaluating Effectiveness of Healthcare Conversations Powered by Generative AIcited by 32
  17. 2023Artificial Influence: An Analysis Of AI-Driven Persuasioncited by 31
  18. 2024Measuring and Benchmarking Large Language Models' Capabilities to Generate Persuasive Languagecited by 31
  19. 2022Duplex Conversation: Towards Human-like Interaction in Spoken Dialogue Systemscited by 28
  20. 2023LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streamingcited by 27
  21. 2022A Literature Survey of Recent Advances in Chatbotscited by 26
  22. 2024Building Better AI Agents: A Provocation on the Utilisation of Persona in LLM-based Conversational Agentscited by 26
  23. 2025Enhancing Personalized Multi-Turn Dialogue with Curiosity Rewardcited by 25
  24. 2023Using Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Natural Language Generation from Knowledge Graphscited by 24
  25. 2024Jill Watson: A Virtual Teaching Assistant powered by ChatGPTcited by 24
  26. 2023Helping the Helper: Supporting Peer Counselors via AI-Empowered Practice and Feedbackcited by 23
  27. 2023Bias and Fairness in Chatbots: An Overviewcited by 20
  28. 2024CloChat: Understanding How People Customize, Interact, and Experience Personas in Large Language Modelscited by 19
  29. 2022FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 18
  30. 2023Emotion Rendering for Conversational Speech Synthesis with Heterogeneous Graph-Based Context Modelingcited by 17
  31. 2021OpenViDial 2.0: A Larger-Scale, Open-Domain Dialogue Generation Dataset with Visual Contextscited by 16
  32. 2022HeterMPC: A Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Response Generation in Multi-Party Conversationscited by 16
  33. 2022Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approachescited by 16
  34. 2022A Mixture-of-Expert Approach to RL-based Dialogue Managementcited by 16
  35. 2023Let's have a chat! A Conversation with ChatGPT: Technology, Applications, and Limitationscited by 16
  36. 2021Partner Matters! An Empirical Study on Fusing Personas for Personalized Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbotscited by 15
  37. 2021Automatically Select Emotion for Response via Personality-affected Emotion Transitioncited by 15
  38. 2022Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunitiescited by 14

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