Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning
Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Wenjie Li, Jiashuo Wang, Ruihui Zhao, Bang Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Yefeng Zheng
Abstract
Providing Emotional Support (ES) to soothe people in emotional distress is an essential capability in social interactions. Most existing researches on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users, which was over-simplified. In comparison, multi-turn ES conversation systems can provide ES more effectively, but face several new technical challenges, including: (1) how to adopt appropriate support strategies to achieve the long-term dialogue goal of comforting the user’s emotion; (2) how to dynamically model the user’s state. In this paper, we propose a novel system MultiESC to address these issues. For strategy planning, drawing inspiration from the A* search algorithm, we propose lookahead heuristics to estimate the future user feedback after using particular strategies, which helps to select strategies that can lead to the best long-term effects. For user state modeling, MultiESC focuses on capturing users’ subtle emotional expressions and understanding their emotion causes. Extensive experiments show that MultiESC significantly outperforms competitive baselines in both dialogue generation and strategy planning.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{cheng-etal-2022-improving,
title = "Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning",
author = "Cheng, Yi and
Liu, Wenge and
Li, Wenjie and
Wang, Jiashuo and
Zhao, Ruihui and
Liu, Bang and
Liang, Xiaodan and
Zheng, Yefeng",
editor = "Goldberg, Yoav and
Kozareva, Zornitsa and
Zhang, Yue",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = dec,
year = "2022",
address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.195/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.195",
pages = "3014--3026"
}