# Multi-Task Learning of Generation and Classification for Emotion-Aware Dialogue Response Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11696/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11504/) (2019)
- [Revealing the Dark Secrets of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08593/) (2019)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [CARE: Commonsense-Aware Emotional Response Generation with Latent Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08377/) (2020)
- [EmpTransfo: A Multi-head Transformer Architecture for Creating Empathetic Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02958/) (2020)
- [Target Guided Emotion Aware Chat Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07432/) (2020)
- [Emotion helps Sentiment: A Multi-task Model for Sentiment and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12569/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Contrast and Generation Make BART a Good Dialogue Emotion Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11202/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Neural Text Generation: A Task-Agnostic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03047/) (2022)
- [Generating Personalized Dialogue via Multi-Task Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03377/) (2021)
- [CHAE: Fine-Grained Controllable Story Generation with Characters, Actions and Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05221/) (2022)
- [DiagESC: Dialogue Synthesis for Integrating Depression Diagnosis into Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06044/) (2024)
- [E-CORE: Emotion Correlation Enhanced Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15016/) (2023)
- [Dynamically Retrieving Knowledge via Query Generation for Informative Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00128/) (2022)
- [M3TCM: Multi-modal Multi-task Context Model for Utterance Classification in Motivational Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03312/) (2024)
- [MASIVE: Open-Ended Affective State Identification in English and Spanish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12196/) (2024)
- [Advancing Multi-Party Dialogue Framework with Speaker-ware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11292/) (2025)
- [Aligning Paralinguistic Understanding and Generation in Speech LLMs via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15981/) (2026)
- [Causal Inference for Chatting Handoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02862/) (2022)
- [Gated Mechanism Enhanced Multi-Task Learning for Dialog Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03730/) (2023)
- [UniRQR: A Unified Model for Retrieval Decision, Query, and Response Generation in Internet-Based Knowledge Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06811/) (2024)
- [Multi-aspect Depression Severity Assessment via Inductive Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21836/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For a computer to naturally interact with a human, it needs to be human-like. In this paper, we propose a neural response generation model with multi-task learning of generation and classification, focusing on emotion. Our model based on BART (Lewis et al., 2020), a pre-trained transformer encoder-decoder model, is trained to generate responses and recognize emotions simultaneously. Furthermore, we weight the losses for the tasks to control the update of parameters. Automatic evaluations and crowdsourced manual evaluations show that the proposed model makes generated responses more emotionally aware.