mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation

arXiv 2202.13047 ↗First posted 26 Feb 2022cs.CLcited by 79

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Abstract (arXiv)

Crowdsourced dialogue corpora are usually limited in scale and topic coverage due to the expensive cost of data curation. This would hinder the generalization of downstream dialogue models to open-domain topics. In this work, we leverage large language models for dialogue augmentation in the task of emotional support conversation (ESC). By treating dialogue augmentation as a dialogue completion task, we prompt a fine-tuned language model to complete full dialogues from available dialogue posts of various topics, which are then postprocessed based on heuristics. Applying this approach, we construct AugESC, an augmented dataset for the ESC task, which largely extends the scale and topic coverage of the crowdsourced ESConv corpus. Through comprehensive human evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach is superior to strong baselines of dialogue augmentation and that AugESC has comparable dialogue quality to the crowdsourced corpus. We also conduct human interactive evaluation and prove that post-training on AugESC improves downstream dialogue models' generalization ability to open-domain topics. These results suggest the utility of AugESC and highlight the potential of large language models in improving data-scarce dialogue generation tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 79 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 31 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2022.

Builds on

31 of 54 references.

References · 31

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
  4. 2019The Curious Case of Neural Text Degenerationcited by 2,881
  5. 2020RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Modelscited by 1,235
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  11. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  12. 2021Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Modelscited by 270
19 more
  1. 2022WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creationcited by 200
  2. 2021Generating Datasets with Pretrained Language Modelscited by 192
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  5. 2019Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systemscited by 126
  6. 2017Deceiving Google's Perspective API Built for Detecting Toxic Commentscited by 99
  7. 2020Toxicity Detection: Does Context Really Matter?cited by 93
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  11. 2021Towards Zero-Label Language Learningcited by 76
  12. 2021On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmarkcited by 73
  13. 2020I like fish, especially dolphins: Addressing Contradictions in Dialogue Modelingcited by 68
  14. 2022Human Evaluation of Conversations is an Open Problem: comparing the sensitivity of various methods for evaluating dialogue agentscited by 62
  15. 2020KdConv: A Chinese Multi-domain Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-turn Knowledge-driven Conversationcited by 59
  16. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  17. 2021EVA: An Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue System with Large-Scale Generative Pre-Trainingcited by 34
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  19. 2020Difference-aware Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-grounded Conversation Generationcited by 14

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 7; 2024: 25; 2025: 27; 2026: 19.

79 papers.

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  1. 2023WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipediacited by 67
  2. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  3. 2024Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometricscited by 56
  4. 2023Click: Controllable Text Generation with Sequence Likelihood Contrastive Learningcited by 41
  5. 2024A Survey on Data Augmentation in Large Model Eracited by 31
  6. 2024Data Augmentation using Large Language Models: Data Perspectives, Learning Paradigms and Challengescited by 30
  7. 2024SweetieChat: A Strategy-Enhanced Role-playing Framework for Diverse Scenarios Handling Emotional Support Agentcited by 24
  8. 2025RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agentscited by 24
  9. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generationcited by 23
  10. 2025From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversationscited by 23
  11. 2022CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 18
  12. 2023COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goalcited by 18
38 more
  1. 2024Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completioncited by 18
  2. 2024See What LLMs Cannot Answer: A Self-Challenge Framework for Uncovering LLM Weaknessescited by 15
  3. 2024Large Language Model for Mental Health: A Systematic Reviewcited by 14
  4. 2024Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guidedcited by 13
  5. 2025KokoroChat: A Japanese Psychological Counseling Dialogue Dataset Collected via Role-Playing by Trained Counselorscited by 13
  6. 2024The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trendscited by 11
  7. 2025Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialoguescited by 11
  8. 2025IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systemscited by 11
  9. 2023Curriculum-Driven Edubot: A Framework for Developing Language Learning Chatbots Through Synthesizing Conversational Datacited by 9
  10. 2024Recent Advancement of Emotion Cognition in Large Language Modelscited by 9
  11. 2025A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 9
  12. 2025From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignmentcited by 9
  13. 2024ConvSDG: Session Data Generation for Conversational Searchcited by 8
  14. 2025ESC-Judge: A Framework for Comparing Emotional Support Conversational Agentscited by 8
  15. 2024Mixed-Session Conversation with Egocentric Memorycited by 7
  16. 2025MHQA: A Diverse, Knowledge Intensive Mental Health Question Answering Challenge for Language Modelscited by 7
  17. 2025SocialSim: Towards Socialized Simulation of Emotional Support Conversationcited by 7
  18. 2025You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversationscited by 7
  19. 2024PSYDIAL: Personality-based Synthetic Dialogue Generation using Large Language Modelscited by 6
  20. 2024Efficient Data Generation for Source-grounded Information-seeking Dialogs: A Use Case for Meeting Transcriptscited by 6
  21. 2023Large Language Models are Few-Shot Training Example Generators: A Case Study in Fallacy Recognitioncited by 5
  22. 2025Emotional Supporters often Use Multiple Strategies in a Single Turncited by 5
  23. 2026PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Modelscited by 5
  24. 2024The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trendscited by 4
  25. 2024SS-GEN: A Social Story Generation Framework with Large Language Modelscited by 4
  26. 2025Convert Language Model into a Value-based Strategic Plannercited by 4
  27. 2026PatientHub: A Unified Framework for Patient Simulationcited by 4
  28. 2023Synthetic Data Generation in Low-Resource Settings via Fine-Tuning of Large Language Modelscited by 3
  29. 2024Enhancing Psychotherapy Counseling: A Data Augmentation Pipeline Leveraging Large Language Models for Counseling Conversationscited by 3
  30. 2025MADP: Multi-Agent Deductive Planning for Enhanced Cognitive-Behavioral Mental Health Question Answercited by 3
  31. 2025EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 3
  32. 2025Enabling Chatbots with Eyes and Ears: An Immersive Multimodal Conversation System for Dynamic Interactionscited by 3
  33. 2026EmoHarbor: Evaluating Personalized Emotional Support by Simulating the User's Internal Worldcited by 3
  34. 2026Overview of the PsyDefDetect Shared Task at BioNLP 2026: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversationscited by 3
  35. 2024FormulaReasoning: A Dataset for Formula-Based Numerical Reasoningcited by 2
  36. 2024FEEL: A Framework for Evaluating Emotional Support Capability with Large Language Modelscited by 2
  37. 2024CPsyExam: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Psychology using Examinationscited by 2
  38. 2024Plan, Generate and Complicate: Improving Low-resource Dialogue State Tracking via Easy-to-Difficult Zero-shot Data Augmentationcited by 2

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