Building an empathetic chatbot is an important objective in dialog generation research, with evaluation being one of the most challenging parts. By empathy, we mean the ability to understand and relate to the speakers’ emotions, and respond to them appropriately. Human evaluation has been considered as the current standard for measuring the performance of open-domain empathetic chatbots. However, existing evaluation procedures suffer from a number of limitations we try to address in our current work. In this paper, we describe iEval, a novel interactive evaluation framework where the person chatting with the bots also rates them on different conversational aspects, as well as ranking them, resulting in greater consistency of the scores. We use iEval to benchmark several state-of-the-art empathetic chatbots, allowing us to discover some intricate details in their performance in different emotional contexts. Based on these results, we present key implications for further improvement of such chatbots. To facilitate other researchers using the iEval framework, we will release our dataset consisting of collected chat logs and human scores.

Effective question-asking is a crucial component of a successful conversational chatbot. It could help the bots manifest empathy and render the interaction more engaging by demonstrating attention to the speaker’s emotions. However, current dialog generation approaches do not model this subtle emotion regulation technique due to the lack of a taxonomy of questions and their purpose in social chitchat. To address this gap, we have developed an empathetic question taxonomy (EQT), with special attention paid to questions’ ability to capture communicative acts and their emotion-regulation intents. We further design a crowd-sourcing task to annotate a large subset of the EmpatheticDialogues dataset with the established labels. We use the crowd-annotated data to develop automatic labeling tools and produce labels for the whole dataset. Finally, we employ information visualization techniques to summarize co-occurrences of question acts and intents and their role in regulating interlocutor’s emotion. These results reveal important question-asking strategies in social dialogs. The EQT classification scheme can facilitate computational analysis of questions in datasets. More importantly, it can inform future efforts in empathetic question generation using neural or hybrid methods.

A significant limitation in developing therapeutic chatbots to support people going through psychological distress is the lack of high-quality, large-scale datasets capturing conversations between clients and trained counselors. As a remedy, researchers have focused their attention on scraping conversational data from peer support platforms such as Reddit. But the extent to which the responses from peers align with responses from trained counselors is understudied. We address this gap by analyzing the differences between responses from counselors and peers by getting trained counselors to annotate ≈17K such responses using Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) code, a well-established behavioral coding system that differentiates between favorable and unfavorable responses. We developed an annotation pipeline with several stages of quality control. Due to its design, this method was able to achieve 97% of coverage, meaning that out of the 17.3K responses we successfully labeled 16.8K with a moderate agreement. We use this data to conclude the extent to which conversational data from peer support platforms align with real therapeutic conversations and discuss in what ways they can be exploited to train therapeutic chatbots.

In this paper, we describe our system submitted to SemEval 2021 Task 7: HaHackathon: Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense. The task aims at predicting whether the given text is humorous, the average humor rating given by the annotators, and whether the humor rating is controversial. In addition, the task also involves predicting how offensive the text is. Our approach adopts the DeBERTa architecture with disentangled attention mechanism, where the attention scores between words are calculated based on their content vectors and relative position vectors. We also took advantage of the pre-trained language models and fine-tuned the DeBERTa model on all the four subtasks. We experimented with several BERT-like structures and found that the large DeBERTa model generally performs better. During the evaluation phase, our system achieved an F-score of 0.9480 on subtask 1a, an RMSE of 0.5510 on subtask 1b, an F-score of 0.4764 on subtask 1c, and an RMSE of 0.4230 on subtask 2a (rank 3 on the leaderboard).

Empathetic dialog generation aims at generating coherent responses following previous dialog turns and, more importantly, showing a sense of caring and a desire to help. Existing models either rely on pre-defined emotion labels to guide the response generation, or use deterministic rules to decide the emotion of the response. With the advent of advanced language models, it is possible to learn subtle interactions directly from the dataset, providing that the emotion categories offer sufficient nuances and other non-emotional but emotional regulating intents are included. In this paper, we describe how to incorporate a taxonomy of 32 emotion categories and 8 additional emotion regulating intents to succeed the task of empathetic response generation. To facilitate the training, we also curated a large-scale emotional dialog dataset from movie subtitles. Through a carefully designed crowdsourcing experiment, we evaluated and demonstrated how our model produces more empathetic dialogs compared with its baselines.

Humor recognition has been widely studied as a text classification problem using data-driven approaches. However, most existing work does not examine the actual joke mechanism to understand humor. We break down any joke into two distinct components: the set-up and the punchline, and further explore the special relationship between them. Inspired by the incongruity theory of humor, we model the set-up as the part developing semantic uncertainty, and the punchline disrupting audience expectations. With increasingly powerful language models, we were able to feed the set-up along with the punchline into the GPT-2 language model, and calculate the uncertainty and surprisal values of the jokes. By conducting experiments on the SemEval 2021 Task 7 dataset, we found that these two features have better capabilities of telling jokes from non-jokes, compared with existing baselines.

Recent development in NLP shows a strong trend towards refining pre-trained models with a domain-specific dataset. This is especially the case for response generation where emotion plays an important role. However, existing empathetic datasets remain small, delaying research efforts in this area, for example, the development of emotion-aware chatbots. One main technical challenge has been the cost of manually annotating dialogues with the right emotion labels. In this paper, we describe a large-scale silver dataset consisting of 1M dialogues annotated with 32 fine-grained emotions, eight empathetic response intents, and the Neutral category. To achieve this goal, we have developed a novel data curation pipeline starting with a small seed of manually annotated data and eventually scaling it to a satisfactory size. We compare its quality against a state-of-the-art gold dataset using both offline experiments and visual validation methods. The resultant procedure can be used to create similar datasets in the same domain as well as in other domains.

Open-domain conversational agents or chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the natural language processing community. One of the challenges is enabling them to converse in an empathetic manner. Current neural response generation methods rely solely on end-to-end learning from large scale conversation data to generate dialogues. This approach can produce socially unacceptable responses due to the lack of large-scale quality data used to train the neural models. However, recent work has shown the promise of combining dialogue act/intent modelling and neural response generation. This hybrid method improves the response quality of chatbots and makes them more controllable and interpretable. A key element in dialog intent modelling is the development of a taxonomy. Inspired by this idea, we have manually labeled 500 response intents using a subset of a sizeable empathetic dialogue dataset (25K dialogues). Our goal is to produce a large-scale taxonomy for empathetic response intents. Furthermore, using lexical and machine learning methods, we automatically analysed both speaker and listener utterances of the entire dataset with identified response intents and 32 emotion categories. Finally, we use information visualization methods to summarize emotional dialogue exchange patterns and their temporal progression. These results reveal novel and important empathy patterns in human-human open-domain conversations and can serve as heuristics for hybrid approaches.