mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition

arXiv 2305.03296 ↗First posted 5 May 2023cs.CLcited by 30

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Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is an emerging and challenging task with the goal of reducing the emotional distress of people. Previous attempts fail to maintain smooth transitions between utterances in ESC because they ignore to grasp the fine-grained transition information at each dialogue turn. To solve this problem, we propose to take into account turn-level state Transitions of ESC (TransESC) from three perspectives, including semantics transition, strategy transition and emotion transition, to drive the conversation in a smooth and natural way. Specifically, we construct the state transition graph with a two-step way, named transit-then-interact, to grasp such three types of turn-level transition information. Finally, they are injected into the transition-aware decoder to generate more engaging responses. Both automatic and human evaluations on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of TransESC to generate more smooth and effective supportive responses. Our source code is available at urlhttps://github.com/circle-hit/TransESC.

Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 May 2023.

Builds on

26 of 33 references.

References · 26

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  3. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
  4. 2017Decoupled Weight Decay Regularizationcited by 1,722
  5. 2015A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Modelscited by 1,068
  6. 2020Recipes for building an open-domain chatbotcited by 593
  7. 2019COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Constructioncited by 450
  8. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  9. 2020COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphscited by 254
  10. 2017Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memorycited by 167
  11. 2020MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 114
  12. 2019MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listenerscited by 91
14 more
  1. 2021CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generationcited by 89
  2. 2022MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 84
  3. 2017MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scalecited by 64
  4. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 59
  5. 2022Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 56
  6. 2020Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Modelscited by 53
  7. 2020Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generationcited by 50
  8. 2020CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generationcited by 43
  9. 2021Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterancescited by 40
  10. 2022FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 18
  11. 2022Don't Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awarenesscited by 16
  12. 2019EmpDG: Multiresolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generationcited by 14
  13. 2017Annotating and Modeling Empathy in Spoken Conversationscited by 10
  14. 2021Knowledge-based Review Generation by Coherence Enhanced Text Planningcited by 10

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 10; 2025: 10; 2026: 9.

30 papers.

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  1. 2024Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversationcited by 55
  2. 2023COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goalcited by 18
  3. 2025IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systemscited by 11
  4. 2025Psychological Counseling Cannot Be Achieved Overnight: Automated Psychological Counseling Through Multi-Session Conversationscited by 11
  5. 2024EmoDynamiX: Emotional Support Dialogue Strategy Prediction by Modelling MiXed Emotions and Discourse Dynamicscited by 9
  6. 2024Steering Conversational Large Language Models for Long Emotional Support Conversationscited by 8
  7. 2025ESC-Judge: A Framework for Comparing Emotional Support Conversational Agentscited by 8
  8. 2024AutoPal: Autonomous Adaptation to Users for Personal AI Companionshipcited by 6
  9. 2024Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive Understanding for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 5
  10. 2025Emotional Supporters often Use Multiple Strategies in a Single Turncited by 5
  11. 2025Towards Open-Ended Emotional Support Conversations in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Future-Oriented Rewardscited by 5
  12. 2024Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conversations with Multifaceted AI Feedbackcited by 4
18 more
  1. 2024CauESC: A Causal Aware Model for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 4
  2. 2024The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trendscited by 4
  3. 2025Convert Language Model into a Value-based Strategic Plannercited by 4
  4. 2025Emotional Support with LLM-based Empathetic Dialogue Generationcited by 4
  5. 2025EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 3
  6. 2024FEEL: A Framework for Evaluating Emotional Support Capability with Large Language Modelscited by 2
  7. 2025Toward Real-World Chinese Psychological Support Dialogues: CPsDD Dataset and a Co-Evolving Multi-Agent Systemcited by 2
  8. 2026TEA-Bench: A Systematic Benchmarking of Tool-enhanced Emotional Support Dialogue Agentcited by 2
  9. 2024Large Language Model Can Be a Foundation for Hidden Rationale-Based Retrievalcited by 1
  10. 2026Stress-Testing Emotional Support Models: Moving from Homogeneous to Diverse Help Seekerscited by 1
  11. 2026Discourse Diversity in Multi-Turn Empathic Dialoguecited by 1
  12. 2026ENPMR-Bench: Benchmarking Proactive Memory Retrieval for Emotional Support Agentscited by 1
  13. 2025Mitigating Strategy Preference Bias in Emotional Support Conversation via Uncertainty Estimationscited by 0
  14. 2026PRCCF: A Persona-guided Retrieval and Causal-aware Cognitive Filtering Framework for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 0
  15. 2026Modeling Multiple Support Strategies within a Single Turn for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 0
  16. 2026ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 0
  17. 2026MindTailor: Personalized Emotional Support via Post History-Grounded Case Formulation and Collaborative Refinementcited by 0
  18. 2026From Triggers to Emotions: A CPM-Grounded Appraisal Multi-Agent for Dynamic Emotional Evolution in Persona-Based Dialoguecited by 0