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MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation

arXiv 2010.01454 ↗First posted 4 Oct 2020cs.CLcited by 114

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Abstract (arXiv)

Current approaches to empathetic response generation view the set of emotions expressed in the input text as a flat structure, where all the emotions are treated uniformly. We argue that empathetic responses often mimic the emotion of the user to a varying degree, depending on its positivity or negativity and content. We show that the consideration of this polarity-based emotion clusters and emotional mimicry results in improved empathy and contextual relevance of the response as compared to the state-of-the-art. Also, we introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied empathetic responses than the previous work. We demonstrate the importance of these factors to empathetic response generation using both automatic- and human-based evaluations. The implementation of MIME is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/MIME.

Key facts. Cited by 114 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 14; 2022: 27; 2023: 24; 2024: 23; 2025: 9; 2026: 17.

114 papers.

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  1. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  2. 2021Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognitioncited by 97
  3. 2021CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generationcited by 89
  4. 2022MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 84
  5. 2021Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 75
  6. 2022Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Supportcited by 68
  7. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  8. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 59
  9. 2022Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 56
  10. 2023Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?cited by 54
  11. 2023A Comprehensive Analysis of the Effectiveness of Large Language Models as Automatic Dialogue Evaluatorscited by 45
  12. 2021Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causescited by 43
38 more
  1. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  2. 2023Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvementscited by 42
  3. 2023Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 41
  4. 2023TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transitioncited by 30
  5. 2024STICKERCONV: Generating Multimodal Empathetic Responses from Scratchcited by 21
  6. 2022Empathic Conversations: A Multi-level Dataset of Contextualized Conversationscited by 20
  7. 2022GraphCFC: A Directed Graph Based Cross-Modal Feature Complementation Approach for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognitioncited by 20
  8. 2022Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selectioncited by 19
  9. 2022CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 18
  10. 2022FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 18
  11. 2021Towards an Online Empathetic Chatbot with Emotion Causescited by 16
  12. 2022Don't Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awarenesscited by 16
  13. 2023Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 15
  14. 2022Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunitiescited by 14
  15. 2023Think Twice: A Human-like Two-stage Conversational Agent for Emotional Response Generationcited by 14
  16. 2022BotsTalk: Machine-sourced Framework for Automatic Curation of Large-scale Multi-skill Dialogue Datasetscited by 13
  17. 2024LaERC-S: Improving LLM-based Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Speaker Characteristicscited by 13
  18. 2025Do LLMs "Feel"? Emotion Circuits Discovery and Controlcited by 13
  19. 2023Improving Empathetic Dialogue Generation by Dynamically Infusing Commonsense Knowledgecited by 12
  20. 2024The Illusion of Empathy: How AI Chatbots Shape Conversation Perceptioncited by 12
  21. 2022Emp-RFT: Empathetic Response Generation via Recognizing Feature Transitions between Utterancescited by 11
  22. 2023Approximating Online Human Evaluation of Social Chatbots with Promptingcited by 11
  23. 2024Cause-Aware Empathetic Response Generation via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuningcited by 11
  24. 2021Style Control for Schema-Guided Natural Language Generationcited by 10
  25. 2021Exemplars-guided Empathetic Response Generation Controlled by the Elements of Human Communicationcited by 9
  26. 2021Empathetic Response Generation through Graph-based Multi-hop Reasoning on Emotional Causalitycited by 9
  27. 2022EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intentscited by 9
  28. 2022Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 9
  29. 2023DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 9
  30. 2023Reasoning before Responding: Integrating Commonsense-based Causality Explanation for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 9
  31. 2023Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inferencecited by 9
  32. 2025Are LLMs Empathetic to All? Investigating the Influence of Multi-Demographic Personas on a Model's Empathycited by 9
  33. 2022Mitigating Toxic Degeneration with Empathetic Data: Exploring the Relationship Between Toxicity and Empathycited by 8
  34. 2023Empathetic Response Generation via Emotion Cause Transition Graphcited by 8
  35. 2024An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 8
  36. 2024Empathy Level Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 8
  37. 2021Empathetic BERT2BERT Conversational Model: Learning Arabic Language Generation with Little Datacited by 7
  38. 2022CARE: Causality Reasoning for Empathetic Responses by Conditional Graph Generationcited by 7

50 most cited of 114 All 114 (JSON)