Non-Emotion-Centric Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Abstract

Previous work on empathetic response generation mainly focused on utilizing the speaker’s emotions to generate responses. However, the performance of identifying fine-grained emotions is limited, introducing cascading errors to empathetic response generation. Moreover, due to the conflict between the information in the dialogue history and the recognized emotions, previous work often generated general and uninformative responses. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework NEC (Non-Emotion-Centric empathetic dialogue generation) based on contrastive learning and context-sensitive entity and social commonsense, in which the frequent replies and sentences with incorrect emotions are punished through contrastive learning, thereby improving the empathy, diversity and information of the responses. The experimental results demonstrate that our NEC enhances the quality of empathetic generation and generates more diverse responses in comparison with the state-of-the-art baselines.The code will be available at https://github.com/huangfu170/NEC-empchat