# MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10960/) (2017)
- [KagNet: Knowledge-Aware Graph Networks for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02151/) (2019)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08654/) (2019)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07687/) (2019)
- [Few-shot Natural Language Generation for Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12328/) (2020)
- [MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04090/) (2017)
- [Story Ending Generation with Incremental Encoding and Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10113/) (2018)
- [Grounded Conversation Generation as Guided Traverses in Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02707/) (2019)
- [Language Generation with Multi-Hop Reasoning on Commonsense Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11692/) (2020)
- [How Far are We from Effective Context Modeling? An Exploratory Study on Semantic Parsing in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00652/) (2020)
- [A Taxonomy of Empathetic Response Intents in Human Social Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04080/) (2020)
- [Knowledgeable Reader: Enhancing Cloze-Style Reading Comprehension with External Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07858/) (2018)
- [Commonsense for Generative Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06309/) (2018)
- [Incorporating Structured Commonsense Knowledge in Story Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00625/) (2018)
- [Ranking and Selecting Multi-Hop Knowledge Paths to Better Predict Human Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00676/) (2019)
- [Emotion-aware Chat Machine: Automatic Emotional Response Generation for Human-like Emotional Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03044/) (2021)
- [MIDAS: A Dialog Act Annotation Scheme for Open Domain Human Machine Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10023/) (2019)
- [CARE: Commonsense-Aware Emotional Response Generation with Latent Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08377/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00273/) (2023)
- [Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11584/) (2023)
- [Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04242/) (2022)
- [CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10278/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [SMILE: Single-turn to Multi-turn Inclusive Language Expansion via ChatGPT for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00450/) (2023)
- [ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10960/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09235/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Emotional Generation Capability of Large Language Models via Emotional Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06836/) (2024)
- [TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03296/) (2023)
- [RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03112/) (2025)
- [SweetieChat: A Strategy-Enhanced Role-playing Framework for Diverse Scenarios Handling Emotional Support Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08389/) (2024)
- [From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11451/) (2025)
- [On the Essence and Prospect: An Investigation of Alignment Approaches for Big Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04204/) (2024)
- [The Colorful Future of LLMs: Evaluating and Improving LLMs as Emotional Supporters for Queer Youth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11886/) (2024)
- [FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00250/) (2022)
- [COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11792/) (2023)
- [Chatbots for Mental Health Support: Exploring the Impact of Emohaa on Reducing Mental Distress in China](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10183/) (2022)
- [Don't Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03884/) (2022)
- [Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07994/) (2023)
- [Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13231/) (2023)
- [ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14952/) (2024)
- [Think Twice: A Human-like Two-stage Conversational Agent for Emotional Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04907/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guided](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01288/) (2024)
- [Improving Empathetic Dialogue Generation by Dynamically Infusing Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04657/) (2023)
- [ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12678/) (2022)
- [Cause-Aware Empathetic Response Generation via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11599/) (2024)
- [IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05947/) (2025)
- [A Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue System with Multi-source Knowledge Fusion for Elders with Cognitive Impairment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08200/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Applying existing methods to emotional support conversation -- which provides valuable assistance to people who are in need -- has two major limitations: (a) they generally employ a conversation-level emotion label, which is too coarse-grained to capture user's instant mental state; (b) most of them focus on expressing empathy in the response(s) rather than gradually reducing user's distress. To address the problems, we propose a novel model MISC, which firstly infers the user's fine-grained emotional status, and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and reveal the benefits of fine-grained emotion understanding as well as mixed-up strategy modeling. Our code and data could be found in urlhttps://github.com/morecry/MISC.