mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems

arXiv 2106.01144 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2021cs.CLcited by 294

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Cited by 31 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains untouched. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ESConv in training more emotional support systems.

Key facts. Cited by 294 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 18 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2021.

Builds on

18 of 42 references.

References · 18

  1. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  2. 2019The Curious Case of Neural Text Degenerationcited by 2,881
  3. 2019DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generationcited by 842
  4. 2017DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Datasetcited by 649
  5. 2020Recipes for building an open-domain chatbotcited by 593
  6. 2016How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generationcited by 356
  7. 2020A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Supportcited by 182
  8. 2018The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbotcited by 172
  9. 2017Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memorycited by 167
  10. 2019Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systemscited by 147
  11. 2020MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 114
  12. 2019MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listenerscited by 91
6 more
  1. 2017MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scalecited by 64
  2. 2017Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generationcited by 61
  3. 2020Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Modelscited by 53
  4. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  5. 2020EmpTransfo: A Multi-head Transformer Architecture for Creating Empathetic Dialog Systemscited by 19
  6. 2020Expressive Interviewing: A Conversational System for Coping with COVID-19cited by 10

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 4; 2022: 24; 2023: 42; 2024: 57; 2025: 68; 2026: 99.

294 papers.

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  1. 2023Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Checkcited by 262
  2. 2022ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agentscited by 109
  3. 2023SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversationscited by 109
  4. 2021PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Supportcited by 92
  5. 2022The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systemscited by 92
  6. 2021CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generationcited by 89
  7. 2024CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counselingcited by 88
  8. 2022MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 84
  9. 2023EduChat: A Large-Scale Language Model-based Chatbot System for Intelligent Educationcited by 80
  10. 2022AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 79
  11. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 76
  12. 2024Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principlescited by 72
38 more
  1. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  2. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  3. 2023Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Policy Planningcited by 60
  4. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 59
  5. 2023CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Supportcited by 58
  6. 2022Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 56
  7. 2024Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversationcited by 55
  8. 2023Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?cited by 54
  9. 2024EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Modelscited by 53
  10. 2024Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agentscited by 48
  11. 2023SMILE: Single-turn to Multi-turn Inclusive Language Expansion via ChatGPT for Mental Health Supportcited by 46
  12. 2024ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systemscited by 46
  13. 2023Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generationscited by 45
  14. 2024CBT-LLM: A Chinese Large Language Model for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-based Mental Health Question Answeringcited by 45
  15. 2023ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Supportcited by 44
  16. 2025AffectGPT: A New Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 43
  17. 2023Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 41
  18. 2022PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generationcited by 39
  19. 2022D4: a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chatcited by 37
  20. 2023CharacterGLM: Customizing Chinese Conversational AI Characters with Large Language Modelscited by 34
  21. 2024Large Language Models in Mental Health Care: a Scoping Reviewcited by 34
  22. 2023LLM-empowered Chatbots for Psychiatrist and Patient Simulation: Application and Evaluationcited by 33
  23. 2023Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Promptingcited by 32
  24. 2024Planning Like Human: A Dual-process Framework for Dialogue Planningcited by 32
  25. 2022EVA2.0: Investigating Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue Systems with Large-Scale Pre-Trainingcited by 31
  26. 2022Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systemscited by 31
  27. 2024A Survey on Data Augmentation in Large Model Eracited by 31
  28. 2023TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transitioncited by 30
  29. 2023Ask an Expert: Leveraging Language Models to Improve Strategic Reasoning in Goal-Oriented Dialogue Modelscited by 30
  30. 2022Rethinking and Refining the Distinct Metriccited by 27
  31. 2022DiaASQ : A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysiscited by 27
  32. 2023Aligning Language Models with Human Preferences via a Bayesian Approachcited by 27
  33. 2023COKE: A Cognitive Knowledge Graph for Machine Theory of Mindcited by 26
  34. 2024ComPeer: A Generative Conversational Agent for Proactive Peer Supportcited by 24
  35. 2024Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspectivecited by 24
  36. 2024SweetieChat: A Strategy-Enhanced Role-playing Framework for Diverse Scenarios Handling Emotional Support Agentcited by 24
  37. 2025RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agentscited by 24
  38. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generationcited by 23

50 most cited of 294 All 294 (JSON)