# E-CORE: Emotion Correlation Enhanced Empathetic Dialogue Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15016 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15016/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [Knowledge-Enriched Transformer for Emotion Detection in Textual Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10681/) (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)
- [SKEP: Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05635/) (2020)
- [Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08828/) (2021)
- [Generating Empathetic Responses by Looking Ahead the User's Sentiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08487/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Learning of Generation and Classification for Emotion-Aware Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11696/) (2021)
- [Emp-RFT: Empathetic Response Generation via Recognizing Feature Transitions between Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03112/) (2022)
- [CASS: Towards Building a Social-Support Chatbot for Online Health Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01583/) (2021)
- [Constructing Emotion Consensus and Utilizing Unpaired Data for Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07779/) (2021)
- [Simulated Annealing for Emotional Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10715/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [STICKERCONV: Generating Multimodal Empathetic Responses from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01679/) (2024)
- [Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10527/) (2024)
- [UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00403/) (2024)
- [E3RG: Building Explicit Emotion-driven Empathetic Response Generation System with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12854/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Achieving empathy is a crucial step toward humanized dialogue systems. Current approaches for empathetic dialogue generation mainly perceive an emotional label to generate an empathetic response conditioned on it, which simply treat emotions independently, but ignore the intrinsic emotion correlation in dialogues, resulting in inaccurate emotion perception and unsuitable response generation. In this paper, we propose a novel emotion correlation enhanced empathetic dialogue generation framework, which comprehensively realizes emotion correlation learning, utilization, and supervising. Specifically, a multi-resolution emotion graph is devised to capture context-based emotion interactions from different resolutions, further modeling emotion correlation. Then we propose an emotion correlation enhanced decoder, with a novel correlation-aware aggregation and soft/hard strategy, respectively improving the emotion perception and response generation. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model in both empathetic perception and expression.