# Reasoning before Responding: Integrating Commonsense-based Causality Explanation for Empathetic Response Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00085/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [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)
- [A Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05869/) (2015)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (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)
- [Few-Shot Bot: Prompt-Based Learning for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08118/) (2021)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [A Taxonomy of Empathetic Response Intents in Human Social Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04080/) (2020)
- [e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05849/) (2022)
- [Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08828/) (2021)
- [Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11715/) (2022)
- [Exemplars-guided Empathetic Response Generation Controlled by the Elements of Human Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11791/) (2021)
- [CARE: Causality Reasoning for Empathetic Responses by Conditional Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00255/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Are Large Language Models More Empathetic than Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05063/) (2024)
- [A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16939/) (2025)
- [Is ChatGPT More Empathetic than Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05572/) (2024)
- [StyEmp: Stylizing Empathetic Response Generation via Multi-Grained Prefix Encoder and Personality Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02271/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Explicit Reasoning for Inference Integration in Commonsense-Augmented Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09138/) (2024)
- [Minority-Aware Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue Systems via Preference-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05407/) (2025)
- [Mind2: Mind-to-Mind Emotional Support System with Bidirectional Cognitive Discourse Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16523/) (2025)
- [Following the TRACE: A Structured Path to Empathetic Response Generation with Multi-Agent Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21849/) (2025)
- [I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11875/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent approaches to empathetic response generation try to incorporate commonsense knowledge or reasoning about the causes of emotions to better understand the user's experiences and feelings. However, these approaches mainly focus on understanding the causalities of context from the user's perspective, ignoring the system's perspective. In this paper, we propose a commonsense-based causality explanation approach for diverse empathetic response generation that considers both the user's perspective (user's desires and reactions) and the system's perspective (system's intentions and reactions). We enhance ChatGPT's ability to reason for the system's perspective by integrating in-context learning with commonsense knowledge. Then, we integrate the commonsense-based causality explanation with both ChatGPT and a T5-based model. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms other comparable methods on both automatic and human evaluations.