# Knowledge-enhanced Memory Model for Emotional Support Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07700/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [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)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04242/) (2022)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09708/) (2020)
- [CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00329/) (2020)
- [CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08316/) (2021)
- [FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00250/) (2022)
- [Why Do Neural Dialog Systems Generate Short and Meaningless Replies? A Comparison between Dialog and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02250/) (2017)
- [Emp-RFT: Empathetic Response Generation via Recognizing Feature Transitions between Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03112/) (2022)
- [Stylized Data-to-Text Generation: A Case Study in the E-Commerce Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03256/) (2023)
- [EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12191/) (2022)
- [Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained RoBERTa-GPT2 and External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03004/) (2021)
- [PoKE: Prior Knowledge Enhanced Emotional Support Conversation with Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12640/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13211/) (2024)
- [Recent Advancement of Emotion Cognition in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13354/) (2024)
- [Towards Open-Ended Emotional Support Conversations in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Future-Oriented Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12935/) (2025)
- [The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04631/) (2024)
- [Emotional Support with LLM-based Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12820/) (2025)
- [Think Thrice Before You Speak: Dual knowledge-enhanced Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Persuasive Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22602/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Strategy Preference Bias in Emotional Support Conversation via Uncertainty Estimations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12661/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The prevalence of mental disorders has become a significant issue, leading to the increased focus on Emotional Support Conversation as an effective supplement for mental health support. Existing methods have achieved compelling results, however, they still face three challenges: 1) variability of emotions, 2) practicality of the response, and 3) intricate strategy modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced Memory mODEl for emotional suppoRt coNversation (MODERN). Specifically, we first devise a knowledge-enriched dialogue context encoding to perceive the dynamic emotion change of different periods of the conversation for coherent user state modeling and select context-related concepts from ConceptNet for practical response generation. Thereafter, we implement a novel memory-enhanced strategy modeling module to model the semantic patterns behind the strategy categories. Extensive experiments on a widely used large-scale dataset verify the superiority of our model over cutting-edge baselines.