Be Helpful but Don’t Talk too Much - Enhancing Helpfulness in Conversations through Relevance in Multi-Turn Emotional Support

Junlin Li, Bo Peng, Yu-Yin Hsu, Chu-Ren Huang

Abstract
For a conversation to help and support, speakers should maintain an “effect-effort” tradeoff. As outlined in the gist of “Cognitive Relevance Principle”, helpful speakers should optimize the “cognitive relevance” through maximizing the “cognitive effects” and minimizing the “processing effort” imposed on listeners. Although preference learning methods have given rise a boon of studies in pursuit of“effect-optimization”, none have delved into the critical “effort-optimiazation” to fully cultivate the awareness of “optimal relevance” into thecognition of conversation agents. To address this gap, we integrate the “Cognitive Relevance Principle” into emotional support agents in the environment of multi-turn conversation. The results demonstrate a significant and robust improvement against the baseline systems with respect to response quality, human-likedness and supportivenss. This study offers compelling evidence for the effectiveness of the “Relevance Principle” in generating human-like, helpful, and harmless emotional support conversations. The source code will be available at https://github.com/CN-Eyetk/VLESA-ORL.git
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.118
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1976–1988
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.118
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.118
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junlin Li, Bo Peng, Yu-Yin Hsu, and Chu-Ren Huang. 2024. Be Helpful but Don’t Talk too Much - Enhancing Helpfulness in Conversations through Relevance in Multi-Turn Emotional Support. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1976–1988, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Be Helpful but Don’t Talk too Much - Enhancing Helpfulness in Conversations through Relevance in Multi-Turn Emotional Support (Li et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2024.emnlp-main.118.pdf
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