Abstract
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.225
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4079–4095
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.225
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.225
- Cite (ACL):
- Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, and Wai Lam. 2023. Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4079–4095, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations (Deng et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.acl-long.225.pdf