Knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative dialogue system for emotional support conversations

Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiati...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: DENG, Yang, ZHANG, Wenxuan, YUAN, Yifei, LAM, Wai
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/9124
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/10127/viewcontent/2023.acl_long.225.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary:Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.