mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation

arXiv 2109.05739 ↗First posted 13 Sep 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 89

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Abstract (arXiv)

A key trait of daily conversations between individuals is the ability to express empathy towards others, and exploring ways to implement empathy is a crucial step towards human-like dialogue systems. Previous approaches on this topic mainly focus on detecting and utilizing the user's emotion for generating empathetic responses. However, since empathy includes both aspects of affection and cognition, we argue that in addition to identifying the user's emotion, cognitive understanding of the user's situation should also be considered. To this end, we propose a novel approach for empathetic response generation, which leverages commonsense to draw more information about the user's situation and uses this additional information to further enhance the empathy expression in generated responses. We evaluate our approach on EmpatheticDialogues, which is a widely-used benchmark dataset for empathetic response generation. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baseline models in both automatic and human evaluations and can generate more informative and empathetic responses.

Key facts. Cited by 89 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

Builds on

16 of 32 references.

References · 16

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  3. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  4. 2019PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Librarycited by 20,160
  5. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
  6. 2015A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Modelscited by 1,068
  7. 2016ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledgecited by 1,065
  8. 2019COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Constructioncited by 450
  9. 2016How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generationcited by 356
  10. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  11. 2020COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphscited by 254
  12. 2020MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 114
4 more
  1. 2019MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listenerscited by 91
  2. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  3. 2019Improving Neural Response Diversity with Frequency-Aware Cross-Entropy Losscited by 29
  4. 2021CASS: Towards Building a Social-Support Chatbot for Online Health Communitycited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 21; 2023: 22; 2024: 25; 2025: 6; 2026: 14.

89 papers.

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  1. 2022AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 79
  2. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  3. 2023CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Supportcited by 58
  4. 2023Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?cited by 54
  5. 2023Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvementscited by 42
  6. 2023Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 41
  7. 2022PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generationcited by 39
  8. 2022EVA2.0: Investigating Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue Systems with Large-Scale Pre-Trainingcited by 31
  9. 2023TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transitioncited by 30
  10. 2022Rethinking and Refining the Distinct Metriccited by 27
  11. 2024STICKERCONV: Generating Multimodal Empathetic Responses from Scratchcited by 21
  12. 2022Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selectioncited by 19
38 more
  1. 2024RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systemscited by 19
  2. 2022CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 18
  3. 2022Acquiring and Modelling Abstract Commonsense Knowledge via Conceptualizationcited by 17
  4. 2022Chatbots for Mental Health Support: Exploring the Impact of Emohaa on Reducing Mental Distress in Chinacited by 17
  5. 2022Don't Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awarenesscited by 16
  6. 2023Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 15
  7. 2024MADial-Bench: Towards Real-world Evaluation of Memory-Augmented Dialogue Generationcited by 15
  8. 2022Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunitiescited by 14
  9. 2023Think Twice: A Human-like Two-stage Conversational Agent for Emotional Response Generationcited by 14
  10. 2023Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Dialogue Analysiscited by 14
  11. 2024LaERC-S: Improving LLM-based Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Speaker Characteristicscited by 13
  12. 2024Talk With Human-like Agents: Empathetic Dialogue Through Perceptible Acoustic Reception and Reactioncited by 13
  13. 2023Improving Empathetic Dialogue Generation by Dynamically Infusing Commonsense Knowledgecited by 12
  14. 2024APTNESS: Incorporating Appraisal Theory and Emotion Support Strategies for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 12
  15. 2022Emp-RFT: Empathetic Response Generation via Recognizing Feature Transitions between Utterancescited by 11
  16. 2022ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledgecited by 11
  17. 2023A Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue System with Multi-source Knowledge Fusion for Elders with Cognitive Impairmentcited by 10
  18. 2024Synth-Empathy: Towards High-Quality Synthetic Empathy Datacited by 10
  19. 2022PanGu-Bot: Efficient Generative Dialogue Pre-training from Pre-trained Language Modelcited by 9
  20. 2022Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 9
  21. 2023DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 9
  22. 2023Reasoning before Responding: Integrating Commonsense-based Causality Explanation for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 9
  23. 2023Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inferencecited by 9
  24. 2024Measuring Psychological Depth in Language Modelscited by 9
  25. 2023Empathetic Response Generation via Emotion Cause Transition Graphcited by 8
  26. 2024An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 8
  27. 2024Empathy Level Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 8
  28. 2022CARE: Causality Reasoning for Empathetic Responses by Conditional Graph Generationcited by 7
  29. 2023Commonsense Reasoning for Conversational AI: A Survey of the State of the Artcited by 7
  30. 2023Rational Sensibility: LLM Enhanced Empathetic Response Generation Guided by Self-presentation Theorycited by 7
  31. 2024ASEM: Enhancing Empathy in Chatbot through Attention-based Sentiment and Emotion Modelingcited by 7
  32. 2024Sentiment-oriented Transformer-based Variational Autoencoder Network for Live Video Commentingcited by 7
  33. 2024A Review of Human Emotion Synthesis Based on Generative Technologycited by 7
  34. 2023CAB: Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Cognition, Affection and Behaviorcited by 6
  35. 2024ReflectDiffu:Reflect between Emotion-intent Contagion and Mimicry for Empathetic Response Generation via a RL-Diffusion Frameworkcited by 6
  36. 2022PoKE: Prior Knowledge Enhanced Emotional Support Conversation with Latent Variablecited by 5
  37. 2022Wish I Can Feel What You Feel: A Neural Approach for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 5
  38. 2024Exploiting Emotion-Semantic Correlations for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 5

50 most cited of 89 All 89 (JSON)