# MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.07687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 91 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 91)

- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07714/) (2021)
- [Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15144/) (2022)
- [Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11584/) (2023)
- [Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04242/) (2022)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08828/) (2021)
- [CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08316/) (2021)
- [Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05140/) (2023)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03296/) (2023)
- [Empathic Conversations: A Multi-level Dataset of Contextualized Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12698/) (2022)
- [Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11715/) (2022)
- [Refocusing on Relevance: Personalization in NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05140/) (2021)
- [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)
- [EmpathBERT: A BERT-based Framework for Demographic-aware Empathy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00272/) (2021)
- [Don't Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03884/) (2022)
- [Automatically Select Emotion for Response via Personality-affected Emotion Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15846/) (2021)
- [Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07994/) (2023)
- [Discovering Emotion and Reasoning its Flip in Multi-Party Conversations using Masked Memory Network and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12360/) (2021)
- [Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05017/) (2022)
- [Think Twice: A Human-like Two-stage Conversational Agent for Emotional Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04907/) (2023)
- [Improving Empathetic Dialogue Generation by Dynamically Infusing Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04657/) (2023)
- [Emp-RFT: Empathetic Response Generation via Recognizing Feature Transitions between Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03112/) (2022)
- [Cause-Aware Empathetic Response Generation via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11599/) (2024)
- [Style Control for Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12211/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Previous research on empathetic dialogue systems has mostly focused on generating responses given certain emotions. However, being empathetic not only requires the ability of generating emotional responses, but more importantly, requires the understanding of user emotions and replying appropriately. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end approach for modeling empathy in dialogue systems: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners (MoEL). Our model first captures the user emotions and outputs an emotion distribution. Based on this, MoEL will softly combine the output states of the appropriate Listener(s), which are each optimized to react to certain emotions, and generate an empathetic response. Human evaluations on empathetic-dialogues (Rashkin et al., 2018) dataset confirm that MoEL outperforms multitask training baseline in terms of empathy, relevance, and fluency. Furthermore, the case study on generated responses of different Listeners shows high interpretability of our model.