Sophia Xiao Pu
2026
ChatAnime: Towards User-Centered Emotional Support in LLM-based Virtual Character Chat
Lanlan Qiu | Sophia Xiao Pu | Yeqi Feng | Wenchang Gao | Tianxing He
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lanlan Qiu | Sophia Xiao Pu | Yeqi Feng | Wenchang Gao | Tianxing He
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
With the growing popularity of virtual character platforms like Character.AI, users are increasingly turning to role-playing agents for emotional support in daily life. Yet existing research mainly focuses on character consistency in fictional or game-based scenarios, overlooking user-centered interactions such as companionship and psychological support. To bridge this gap, we propose Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing (ESRP), a framework designed to align role-playing with real-world user scenarios and emotional needs. We focus on typical users of these platforms, i.e., anime enthusiasts—including students, office workers, freelancers, and self-employed individuals—and design scenario-based questions that reflect their everyday struggles such as work stress and social loneliness. Through a two-round data collection involving 40 anime fans and 10 Large Language Models (LLMs), we build ChatAnime: the first ESRP dataset with 2,400 human-written and 24,000 LLM-generated responses, supported by over 132,000 fine-grained human annotations. We also provide the ESRP evaluation framework featuring 9 fine-grained metrics across three dimensions: basic dialogue, role-playing and emotional support, along with an overall metric for diversity. Experimental results under our evaluation setting show that top-performing LLMs surpass anime fans in role-playing and emotional support, while humans still lead in diversity.
2025
Dynamic Evaluation for Oversensitivity in LLMs
Sophia Xiao Pu | Sitao Cheng | Xin Eric Wang | William Yang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Sophia Xiao Pu | Sitao Cheng | Xin Eric Wang | William Yang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Oversensitivity occurs when language models defensively reject prompts that are actually benign. This behavior not only disrupts user interactions but also obscures the boundary between harmful and harmless content. Existing benchmarks rely on static datasets that degrade over time as models evolve, leading to data contamination and diminished evaluative power. To address this, we develop a framework that dynamically generates model-specific challenging datasets, capturing emerging defensive patterns and aligning with each model’s unique behavior. Building on this approach, we construct OverBench, a benchmark that aggregates these datasets across diverse LLM families, encompassing 450,000 samples from 25 models. OverBench provides a dynamic and evolving perspective on oversensitivity, allowing for continuous monitoring of defensive triggers as models advance, highlighting vulnerabilities that static datasets overlook.