# PRCCF: A Persona-guided Retrieval and Causal-aware Cognitive Filtering Framework for Emotional Support Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01671/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models For Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04776/) (2018)
- [Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11820/) (2020)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13211/) (2024)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [Skeleton-to-Response: Dialogue Generation Guided by Retrieval Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05296/) (2018)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [Response Generation by Context-aware Prototype Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07042/) (2018)
- [PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09235/) (2022)
- [DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13031/) (2022)
- [TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03296/) (2023)
- [Controlling Dialogue Generation with Semantic Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09075/) (2020)
- [COSPLAY: Concept Set Guided Personalized Dialogue Generation Across Both Party Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00872/) (2022)
- [FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00250/) (2022)
- [Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07994/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive Understanding for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02505/) (2024)
- [Convert Language Model into a Value-based Strategic Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06987/) (2025)
- [CauESC: A Causal Aware Model for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17755/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate individual emotional distress by generating empathetic responses. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively supporting deep contextual understanding. To address this issue, we propose PRCCF, a Persona-guided Retrieval and Causality-aware Cognitive Filtering framework. Specifically, the framework incorporates a persona-guided retrieval mechanism that jointly models semantic compatibility and persona alignment to enhance response generation. Furthermore, it employs a causality-aware cognitive filtering module to prioritize causally relevant external knowledge, thereby improving contextual cognitive understanding for emotional reasoning. Extensive experiments on the ESConv dataset demonstrate that PRCCF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YancyLyx/PRCCF.