Xu Wang
Other people with similar names: Xu Wang, Xu Wang, Xu Wang, Xu Wang
Unverified author pages with similar names: Xu Wang
2026
REG: Retrieval via Emotion Similarity for Guiding Empathetic Dialogue Generation
Xu Wang | Bo Wang | Yang Xiang | Yihong Tang | Dongming Zhao | Yuzifei | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xu Wang | Bo Wang | Yang Xiang | Yihong Tang | Dongming Zhao | Yuzifei | Yuexian Hou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Empathy relies on the cognitive capacity to relate to similar past experiences. Consequently, retrieval-based approaches utilize analogous exemplars to guide empathetic dialogue generation. However, existing methods prioritize semantic similarity over emotion characteristics, often leading to unempathetic responses. To address this, we propose REG, a framework that integrates four Emotion Attributes into the retrieval process to ensure explicit emotional alignment. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise and limited diversity caused by coarse-grained sentence-level attributes, we incorporate Token-level Retrieval for finer granularity and a Retrieval Candidate Augmentation strategy to enhance diversity. Empirical results on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset demonstrate that REG significantly outperforms baselines, offering a robust solution for empathetic generation.