MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation
TL
TL;DR
This work argues that empathetic responses often mimic the emotion of the user to a varying degree, depending on its positivity or negativity and content, and introduces stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied emPathetic responses than the previous work.
Abstract
Current approaches to empathetic response generation view the set of emotions expressed in the input text as a flat structure, where all the emotions are treated uniformly. We argue that empathetic responses often mimic the emotion of the user to a varying degree, depending on its positivity or negativity and content. We show that the consideration of this polarity-based emotion clusters and emotional mimicry results in improved empathy and contextual relevance of the response as compared to the state-of-the-art. Also, we introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied empathetic responses than the previous work. We demonstrate the importance of these factors to empathetic response generation using both automatic- and human-based evaluations. The implementation of MIME is publicly available at this https URL.
References46 items
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Generative Adversarial Networks
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Learning Word Ratings for Empathy and Distress from Document-Level User Responses
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MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners
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Generating Empathetic Responses by Looking Ahead the User’s Sentiment
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