# Improving Empathetic Dialogue Generation by Dynamically Infusing Commonsense Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04657/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [COSMIC: COmmonSense knowledge for eMotion Identification in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02795/) (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)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04090/) (2017)
- [Grounded Conversation Generation as Guided Traverses in Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02707/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09708/) (2020)
- [CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08316/) (2021)
- [A Theory of Consciousness from a Theoretical Computer Science Perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13704/) (2021)
- [CARE: Commonsense-Aware Emotional Response Generation with Latent Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08377/) (2020)
- [Improving Contextual Coherence in Variational Personalized and Empathetic Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05971/) (2022)
- [Probing Commonsense Explanation in Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09574/) (2021)
- [Exemplars-guided Empathetic Response Generation Controlled by the Elements of Human Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11791/) (2021)
- [Nonlinear Regression without i.i.d. Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09623/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10960/) (2024)
- [Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05140/) (2023)
- [Cause-Aware Empathetic Response Generation via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11599/) (2024)
- [An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17959/) (2024)
- [TOOL-ED: Enhancing Empathetic Response Generation with the Tool Calling Capability of LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03096/) (2024)
- [Cognition Chain for Explainable Psychological Stress Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14009/) (2024)
- [Emotion and Intention Guided Multi-Modal Learning for Sticker Response Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17587/) (2025)
- [An Adaptive Framework of Geographical Group-Specific Network on O2O Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17072/) (2023)
- [Efficient-Empathy: Towards Efficient and Effective Selection of Empathy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01937/) (2024)
- [A Practice of Post-Training on Llama-3 70B with Optimal Selection of Additional Language Mixture Ratio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06624/) (2024)
- [Mind2: Mind-to-Mind Emotional Support System with Bidirectional Cognitive Discourse Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16523/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Commonsense Coordination for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22136/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In empathetic conversations, individuals express their empathy towards others. Previous work has mainly focused on generating empathetic responses by utilizing the speaker's emotion. Besides, external commonsense knowledge has been applied to enhance the system's understandings of the speaker's situation. However, given an event, commonsense knowledge base contains various relations, potentially leading to confusion for the dialogue system. Consequently, inconsistencies arise among the emotion, generated response and speaker's contextual information. To this end, we propose a novel approach for empathetic response generation, which incorporates an adaptive module for commonsense knowledge selection to ensure consistency between the generated empathetic responses and the speaker's situation. This selected knowledge is used to refine the commonsense cognition and empathy expression for generated responses. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms baseline models in both automatic and human evaluations, exhibiting the generation of more coherent and empathetic responses. Moreover, case studies highlight the interpretability of knowledge selection in the responses and the effectiveness of adaptive module in our model. Code: https://github.com/Hanscal/DCKS.