The development of Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems is critical for delivering mental health support tailored to the needs of help-seekers. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have contributed to progress in this domain, while most existing studies focus on generating responses directly and overlook the integration of domain-specific reasoning and expert interaction.Therefore, in this paper, we propose a training-free Multi-Agent collaboration framework for ESC (MultiAgentESC).The framework is designed to emulate the human-like process of providing emotional support through three stages: dialogue analysis, strategy deliberation, and response generation.At each stage, a multi-agent system is employed to iteratively enhance information understanding and reasoning, simulating real-world decision-making processes by incorporating diverse interactions among these expert agents.Additionally, we introduce a novel response-centered approach to handle the one-to-many problem on strategy selection, where multiple valid strategies are initially employed to generate diverse responses, followed by the selection of the optimal response through multi-agent collaboration.Experiments on the ESConv dataset reveal that our proposed framework excels at providing emotional support as well as diversifying support strategy selection.

Traditional neural language models tend to generate generic replies with poor logic and no emotion. In this paper, a syntactically constrained bidirectional-asynchronous approach for emotional conversation generation (E-SCBA) is proposed to address this issue. In our model, pre-generated emotion keywords and topic keywords are asynchronously introduced into the process of decoding. It is much different from most existing methods which generate replies from the first word to the last. Through experiments, the results indicate that our approach not only improves the diversity of replies, but gains a boost on both logic and emotion compared with baselines.