# AFEC: A Knowledge Graph Capturing Social Intelligence in Casual Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10850/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [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)
- [The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08909/) (2015)
- [Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents' Ability to Blend Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08449/) (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)
- [ASER: A Large-scale Eventuality Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00270/) (2019)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [EmotionLines: An Emotion Corpus of Multi-Party Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08379/) (2018)
- [A Taxonomy of Empathetic Response Intents in Human Social Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04080/) (2020)
- [Empathetic Dialog Generation with Fine-Grained Intents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06829/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces AFEC, an automatically curated knowledge graph based on people's day-to-day casual conversations. The knowledge captured in this graph bears potential for conversational systems to understand how people offer acknowledgement, consoling, and a wide range of empathetic responses in social conversations. For this body of knowledge to be comprehensive and meaningful, we curated a large-scale corpus from the r/CasualConversation SubReddit. After taking the first two turns of all conversations, we obtained 134K speaker nodes and 666K listener nodes. To demonstrate how a chatbot can converse in social settings, we built a retrieval-based chatbot and compared it with existing empathetic dialog models. Experiments show that our model is capable of generating much more diverse responses (at least 15% higher diversity scores in human evaluation), while still outperforming two out of the four baselines in terms of response quality.