# Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12749 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (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)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [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)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05709/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Knowledge-Enhanced Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04389/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DA-GCN: A Domain-aware Attentive Graph Convolution Network for Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03300/) (2021)
- [Co-GAT: A Co-Interactive Graph Attention Network for Joint Dialog Act Recognition and Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13260/) (2020)
- [IIE-NLP-NUT at SemEval-2020 Task 4: Guiding PLM with Prompt Template Reconstruction Strategy for ComVE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00924/) (2020)
- [Modeling Intention, Emotion and External World in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06476/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00250/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network for Causal Emotion Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02995/) (2022)
- [Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07994/) (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)
- [IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05947/) (2025)
- [Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15316/) (2023)
- [EmoDynamiX: Emotional Support Dialogue Strategy Prediction by Modelling MiXed Emotions and Discourse Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08782/) (2024)
- [From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16610/) (2025)
- [CTRLStruct: Dialogue Structure Learning for Open-Domain Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01094/) (2023)
- [Steering Conversational Large Language Models for Long Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10453/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Memory Model for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07700/) (2023)
- [AutoPal: Autonomous Adaptation to Users for Personal AI Companionship](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13960/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive Understanding for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02505/) (2024)
- [Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04093/) (2024)
- [Towards Open-Ended Emotional Support Conversations in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Future-Oriented Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12935/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional support conversation aims at reducing the emotional distress of the help-seeker, which is a new and challenging task. It requires the system to explore the cause of help-seeker's emotional distress and understand their psychological intention to provide supportive responses. However, existing methods mainly focus on the sequential contextual information, ignoring the hierarchical relationships with the global cause and local psychological intention behind conversations, thus leads to a weak ability of emotional support. In this paper, we propose a Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network to capture the multi-source information (global cause, local intentions and dialog history) and model hierarchical relationships between them, which consists of a multi-source encoder, a hierarchical graph reasoner, and a global-guide decoder. Furthermore, a novel training objective is designed to monitor semantic information of the global cause. Experimental results on the emotional support conversation dataset, ESConv, confirm that the proposed GLHG has achieved the state-of-the-art performance on the automatic and human evaluations. The code will be released in here footnotesmall~https://github.com/pengwei-iie/GLHG.