mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations

arXiv 2305.10172 ↗First posted 17 May 2023cs.CL cs.IRcited by 41

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Abstract (arXiv)

Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.

Key facts. Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 71 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 May 2023.

Builds on

40 of 71 references.

References · 40

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
  3. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
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  5. 2020Recipes for building an open-domain chatbotcited by 593
  6. 2019COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Constructioncited by 450
  7. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 299
  8. 2017Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memorycited by 167
  9. 2019Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversationscited by 139
  10. 2020MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 114
  11. 2021Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generationcited by 100
  12. 2019MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listenerscited by 91
28 more
  1. 2021CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generationcited by 89
  2. 2019Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goalscited by 88
  3. 2022MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 85
  4. 2021Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 75
  5. 2023A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospectscited by 66
  6. 2022A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Challengescited by 61
  7. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 60
  8. 2022Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 56
  9. 2020A Taxonomy of Empathetic Response Intents in Human Social Conversationscited by 51
  10. 2021Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learningcited by 51
  11. 2020Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generationcited by 50
  12. 2020Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems via User Simulationcited by 47
  13. 2022PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Financecited by 45
  14. 2021Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causescited by 43
  15. 2021Speaker and Time-aware Joint Contextual Learning for Dialogue-act Classification in Counselling Conversationscited by 31
  16. 2022DiaASQ : A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysiscited by 27
  17. 2022Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search Systems via User Simulationcited by 25
  18. 2021Emotion-aware Chat Machine: Automatic Emotional Response Generation for Human-like Emotional Interactioncited by 21
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  23. 2021Towards an Online Empathetic Chatbot with Emotion Causescited by 16
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  25. 2021A Large-Scale Analysis of Mixed Initiative in Information-Seeking Dialogues for Conversational Searchcited by 9
  26. 2020An Analysis of Mixed Initiative and Collaboration in Information-Seeking Dialoguescited by 8
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  28. 2020Population-Scale Study of Human Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis and Implicationscited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 8; 2024: 10; 2025: 13; 2026: 10.

41 papers.

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  1. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 77
  2. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  3. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  4. 2024Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversationcited by 55
  5. 2023Beyond Factuality: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models as Knowledge Generatorscited by 43
  6. 2025From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversationscited by 23
  7. 2023COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goalcited by 18
  8. 2023Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation via Order-Insensitive Representation Regularizationcited by 17
  9. 2024Depression Diagnosis Dialogue Simulation: Self-improving Psychiatrist with Tertiary Memorycited by 14
  10. 2024Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategiescited by 10
  11. 2023Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inferencecited by 9
  12. 2024EmoDynamiX: Emotional Support Dialogue Strategy Prediction by Modelling MiXed Emotions and Discourse Dynamicscited by 9
29 more
  1. 2025A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 9
  2. 2024Script-Strategy Aligned Generation: Aligning LLMs with Expert-Crafted Dialogue Scripts and Therapeutic Strategies for Psychotherapycited by 7
  3. 2023Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialoguecited by 6
  4. 2024AutoPal: Autonomous Adaptation to Users for Personal AI Companionshipcited by 6
  5. 2025ECKGBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models in E-commerce Leveraging Knowledge Graphcited by 6
  6. 2025Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Modelscited by 6
  7. 2024Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conversations with Multifaceted AI Feedbackcited by 5
  8. 2025Emotional Supporters often Use Multiple Strategies in a Single Turncited by 5
  9. 2025DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimizationcited by 5
  10. 2025Towards Open-Ended Emotional Support Conversations in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Future-Oriented Rewardscited by 5
  11. 2024The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trendscited by 4
  12. 2025DialogXpert: Driving Intelligent and Emotion-Aware Conversations through Online Value-Based Reinforcement Learning with LLM Priorscited by 4
  13. 2024Towards Reliable and Empathetic Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chatscited by 3
  14. 2026Affective Flow Language Model for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 3
  15. 2026MHSafeEval: Role-Aware Interaction-Level Evaluation of Mental Health Safety in Large Language Modelscited by 3
  16. 2024Are Large Language Models Possible to Conduct Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?cited by 2
  17. 2025When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computingcited by 2
  18. 2025Toward Real-World Chinese Psychological Support Dialogues: CPsDD Dataset and a Co-Evolving Multi-Agent Systemcited by 2
  19. 2026Responsible Evaluation of AI for Mental Healthcited by 2
  20. 2026Knowing Isn't Understanding: Re-grounding Generative Proactivity with Epistemic and Behavioral Insightcited by 2
  21. 2026Think Thrice Before You Speak: Dual knowledge-enhanced Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Persuasive Agentscited by 2
  22. 2025DeepPsy-Agent: A Stage-Aware and Deep-Thinking Emotional Support Agent Systemcited by 1
  23. 2025Enhancing User Engagement in Socially-Driven Dialogue through Interactive LLM Alignmentscited by 1
  24. 2026PsyProbe: Proactive and Interpretable Dialogue through User State Modeling for Exploratory Counselingcited by 1
  25. 2026LifeSide: Benchmarking Agents as Lifelong Digital Companionscited by 1
  26. 2025Mind2: Mind-to-Mind Emotional Support System with Bidirectional Cognitive Discourse Analysiscited by 0
  27. 2026PRCCF: A Persona-guided Retrieval and Causal-aware Cognitive Filtering Framework for Emotional Support Conversationcited by 0
  28. 2026SAGE: A Strategy-Aware Graph-Enhanced Generation Framework For Online Counselingcited by 0
  29. 2026Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligencecited by 0