# Emotion-aware Chat Machine: Automatic Emotional Response Generation for Human-like Emotional Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03044 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03044/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [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)
- [A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03130/) (2017)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [Toward Controlled Generation of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00955/) (2017)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04808/) (2015)
- [A Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05869/) (2015)
- [A Hierarchical Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Generating Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06069/) (2016)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02364/) (2015)
- [A Neural Network Approach to Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06714/) (2015)
- [On Using Very Large Target Vocabulary for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2007/) (2014)
- [Grammar as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7449/) (2014)
- [MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04090/) (2017)
- [A Simple, Fast Diverse Decoding Algorithm for Neural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08562/) (2016)
- [Affect-LM: A Neural Language Model for Customizable Affective Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06851/) (2017)
- [Sequence to Backward and Forward Sequences: A Content-Introducing Approach to Generative Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00970/) (2016)
- [An Information Retrieval Approach to Short Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.6988/) (2014)
- [Assigning personality/identity to a chatting machine for coherent conversation generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02861/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [A Survey of Controllable Text Generation using Transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05337/) (2022)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [Angry Men, Sad Women: Large Language Models Reflect Gendered Stereotypes in Emotion Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03121/) (2024)
- [Speaker and Time-aware Joint Contextual Learning for Dialogue-act Classification in Counselling Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06647/) (2021)
- [Multi-view Intent Disentangle Graph Networks for Bundle Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11425/) (2022)
- [CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08845/) (2022)
- [Improving Personality Consistency in Conversation by Persona Extending](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10816/) (2022)
- [Automatically Select Emotion for Response via Personality-affected Emotion Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15846/) (2021)
- [Automatic Noisy Label Correction for Fine-Grained Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03011/) (2022)
- [BiSyn-GAT+: Bi-Syntax Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03117/) (2022)
- [Modulating Language Models with Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07886/) (2021)
- [Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained RoBERTa-GPT2 and External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03004/) (2021)
- [STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15003/) (2022)
- [MentalAgora: A Gateway to Advanced Personalized Care in Mental Health through Multi-Agent Debating and Attribute Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02736/) (2024)
- [DiagESC: Dialogue Synthesis for Integrating Depression Diagnosis into Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06044/) (2024)
- [PoKE: Prior Knowledge Enhanced Emotional Support Conversation with Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12640/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Causal Analysis into Diversified and Logical Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09482/) (2022)
- [Personality-affected Emotion Generation in Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07229/) (2024)
- [Personalized Topic Selection Model for Topic-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01988/) (2024)
- [Incongruent Positivity: When Miscalibrated Positivity Undermines Online Supportive Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10184/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The consistency of a response to a given post at semantic-level and emotional-level is essential for a dialogue system to deliver human-like interactions. However, this challenge is not well addressed in the literature, since most of the approaches neglect the emotional information conveyed by a post while generating responses. This article addresses this problem by proposing a unifed end-to-end neural architecture, which is capable of simultaneously encoding the semantics and the emotions in a post for generating more intelligent responses with appropriately expressed emotions. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both content coherence and emotion appropriateness.