EmpMFF: A Multi-factor Sequence Fusion Framework for Empathetic Response Generation

Empathy is one of the fundamental abilities of dialog systems. In order to build more intelligent dialogue systems, it’s important to learn how to demonstrate empathy toward others. Existing studies focus on identifying and leveraging the user’s coarse emotion to generate empathetic responses. However, human emotion and dialog act (e.g., intent) evolve as the talk goes along in an empathetic dialogue. This leads to the generated responses with very different intents from the human responses. As a result, empathy failure is ultimately caused. Therefore, using fine-grained emotion and intent sequential data on conversational emotions and dialog act is crucial for empathetic response generation. On the other hand, existing empathy models overvalue the empathy of responses while ignoring contextual relevance, which results in repetitive model-generated responses. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Factor sequence Fusion framework (EmpMFF) based on conditional variational autoencoder. To generate empathetic responses, the proposed EmpMFF encodes a combination of contextual, emotion, and intent information into a continuous latent variable, which is then fed into the decoder. Experiments on the EmpatheticDialogues benchmark dataset demonstrate that EmpMFF exhibits exceptional performance in both automatic and human evaluations.