# Empathetic Response Generation with State Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03676/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07149/) (2017)
- [MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07687/) (2019)
- [MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04090/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Affect-LM: A Neural Language Model for Customizable Affective Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06851/) (2017)
- [Affect-Driven Dialog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02793/) (2019)
- [CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00329/) (2020)
- [Generating Empathetic Responses by Looking Ahead the User's Sentiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08487/) (2019)
- [EmpTransfo: A Multi-head Transformer Architecture for Creating Empathetic Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02958/) (2020)
- [Towards Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models: a New Benchmark and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00207/) (2018)
- [Generating Multiple Diverse Responses for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05696/) (2018)
- [Learning Personas from Dialogue with Attentive Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08717/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A good empathetic dialogue system should first track and understand a user's emotion and then reply with an appropriate emotion. However, current approaches to this task either focus on improving the understanding of users' emotion or on proposing better responding strategies, and very few works consider both at the same time. Our work attempts to fill this vacancy. Inspired by task-oriented dialogue systems, we propose a novel empathetic response generation model with emotion-aware dialogue management. The emotion-aware dialogue management contains two parts: (1) Emotion state tracking maintains the current emotion state of the user and (2) Empathetic dialogue policy selection predicts a target emotion and a user's intent based on the results of the emotion state tracking. The predicted information is then used to guide the generation of responses. Experimental results show that dynamically managing different information can help the model generate more empathetic responses compared with several baselines under both automatic and human evaluations.