Transformer-based Empathetic Response Generation Using Dialogue Situation and Advanced-Level Definition of Empathy

Yi Hsuan Wang, Jia Hao Hsu, Chung Hsien Wu, Tsung Hsien Yang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

14 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This study proposes an approach to transformer-based empathetic response generation using dialogue situation and advanced-level definition of empathy. First, SBERT is adopted to extract the dialog situation vector from the user's historical sentences. A BERT-based emotion detector, a topic detector and an information estimator are constructed for empathy-related feature extraction. The change of the emotional valance and the textual information gain, obtained from the emotion detector and the information estimator, are used for adversarial training of the transformer-based empathetic response generator. The loss function of the transformer is defined to measure how good the expected response in terms of fluency and empathy. The EmpatheticDialogues corpus was adopted for system training and evaluation on empathetic response generation. According to the experimental results, the BLEU score was increased to 7.821 after considering the dialogue situation feature and empathy definition, outperforming the comparison models. In terms of human subjective evaluation, three evaluation results of empathy, relevance and fluency for the proposed system are better than that for the baseline model.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2021 12th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781728169941
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021 Jan 24
Event12th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2021 - Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Duration: 2021 Jan 242021 Jan 27

Publication series

Name2021 12th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2021

Conference

Conference12th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2021
Country/TerritoryHong Kong
CityHong Kong
Period21-01-2421-01-27

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Signal Processing
  • Linguistics and Language

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