# Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12316 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12316/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Controllable Text Generation using Transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05337/) (2022)
- [Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05797/) (2022)
- [Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11584/) (2023)
- [RePrompt: Automatic Prompt Editing to Refine AI-Generative Art Towards Precise Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09466/) (2023)
- [CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08316/) (2021)
- [PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09235/) (2022)
- [TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03296/) (2023)
- [Information Retrieval Meets Large Language Models: A Strategic Report from Chinese IR Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09751/) (2023)
- [LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08401/) (2023)
- [CPED: A Large-Scale Chinese Personalized and Emotional Dialogue Dataset for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14727/) (2022)
- [Building Better AI Agents: A Provocation on the Utilisation of Persona in LLM-based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11977/) (2024)
- [MPCHAT: Towards Multimodal Persona-Grounded Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17388/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in Personalized Dialogue Generation: A Review of Datasets, Methodologies, and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17974/) (2024)
- [PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02364/) (2023)
- [IQA-EVAL: Automatic Evaluation of Human-Model Interactive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13545/) (2024)
- [Refocusing on Relevance: Personalization in NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05140/) (2021)
- [PRODIGy: a PROfile-based DIalogue Generation dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05195/) (2023)
- [History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for Multi-session Open-domain Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00907/) (2023)
- [Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05017/) (2022)
- [Prompting with Pseudo-Code Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11790/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Dialogue Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06490/) (2023)
- [Enhanced Speaker-aware Multi-party Multi-turn Dialogue Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04066/) (2021)
- [Learning Implicit User Profiles for Personalized Retrieval-Based Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07935/) (2021)
- [Transferable Persona-Grounded Dialogues via Grounded Minimal Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07713/) (2021)
- [Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09746/) (2022)
- [An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17959/) (2024)
- [Empathy Level Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02976/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an important role in empathetic conversations. To this end, we propose a new task towards persona-based empathetic conversations and present the first empirical study on the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Specifically, we first present a novel large-scale multi-domain dataset for persona-based empathetic conversations. We then propose CoBERT, an efficient BERT-based response selection model that obtains the state-of-the-art performance on our dataset. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Notably, our results show that persona improves empathetic responding more when CoBERT is trained on empathetic conversations than non-empathetic ones, establishing an empirical link between persona and empathy in human conversations.