Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models
Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an...
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sg-ntu-dr.10356-1509682021-06-09T08:13:09Z Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models Zhong, Peixiang Zhang, Chen Wang, Hao Liu, Yong Miao, Chunyan School of Computer Science and Engineering 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY) Engineering::Computer science and engineering Empathy CoBert Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an important role in empathetic conversations. To this end, we propose a new task towards persona-based empathetic conversations and present the first empirical study on the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Specifically, we first present a novel large-scale multi-domain dataset for persona-based empathetic conversations. We then propose CoBERT, an efficient BERT-based response selection model that obtains the state-of-the-art performance on our dataset. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Notably, our results show that persona improves empathetic responding more when CoBERT is trained on empathetic conversations than non-empathetic ones, establishing an empirical link between persona and empathy in human conversations. AI Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Accepted version This research is supported, in part, by Alibaba Group through Alibaba Innovative Research (AIR) Program and Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute (JRI) (Alibaba-NTU-AIR2019B1), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This research is also supported, in part, by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme (AISG Award No: AISG-GC-2019-003) and under its NRF Investigatorship Programme (NRFI Award No. NRF-NRFI05-2019-0002). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of National Research Foundation, Singapore. This research is also supported, in part, by the Singapore Ministry of Health under its National Innovation Challenge on Active and Confident Ageing (NIC Project No. MOH/NIC/COG04/2017 and MOH/NIC/HAIG03/2017). 2021-06-09T08:13:09Z 2021-06-09T08:13:09Z 2020 Conference Paper Zhong, P., Zhang, C., Wang, H., Liu, Y. & Miao, C. (2020). Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models. 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 6556-6566. https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.531 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150968 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.531 6556 6566 en © 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). All rights reserved. This paper was published in 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) and is made available with permission of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). application/pdf |
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Engineering::Computer science and engineering Empathy CoBert Zhong, Peixiang Zhang, Chen Wang, Hao Liu, Yong Miao, Chunyan Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
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Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an important role in empathetic conversations. To this end, we propose a new task towards persona-based empathetic conversations and present the first empirical study on the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Specifically, we first present a novel large-scale multi-domain dataset for persona-based empathetic conversations. We then propose CoBERT, an efficient BERT-based response selection model that obtains the state-of-the-art performance on our dataset. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Notably, our results show that persona improves empathetic responding more when CoBERT is trained on empathetic conversations than non-empathetic ones, establishing an empirical link between persona and empathy in human conversations. |
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School of Computer Science and Engineering |
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School of Computer Science and Engineering Zhong, Peixiang Zhang, Chen Wang, Hao Liu, Yong Miao, Chunyan |
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Conference or Workshop Item |
author |
Zhong, Peixiang Zhang, Chen Wang, Hao Liu, Yong Miao, Chunyan |
author_sort |
Zhong, Peixiang |
title |
Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
title_short |
Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
title_full |
Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
title_fullStr |
Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
title_full_unstemmed |
Towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
title_sort |
towards persona-based empathetic conversational models |
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2021 |
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https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150968 |
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1702431160313839616 |