EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents

Anonymous

Paper Link: https://openreview.net/forum?id=Df_CpzeOUiL

Paper Type: Long paper (up to eight pages of content + unlimited references and appendices)

Abstract: In empathetic conversations, humans express their empathy to others with empathetic intents. However, most existing empathetic conversational methods suffer from a lack of empathetic intents, which leads to monotonous empathy. To address the bias of the empathetic intents distribution between empathetic dialogue models and humans, we propose a novel model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent empathetic intents, EmpHi for short. Precisely, EmpHi learns the distribution of potential empathetic intents with a discrete latent variable, then combines both implicit and explicit intent representation to generate responses with various empathetic intents. Experiments show that EmpHi outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on both automatic and human evaluation. Moreover, the case studies demonstrate the high interpretability and outstanding performance of our model.

Copyright Consent Signature (type Name Or NA If Not Transferrable): Mao Yan Chen

Copyright Consent Name And Address: Mao Yan Chen / Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University