@inproceedings{chen-etal-2022-emphi,
    title = "{E}mp{H}i: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents",
    author = "Chen, Mao Yan  and
      Li, Siheng  and
      Yang, Yujiu",
    editor = "Carpuat, Marine  and
      de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine  and
      Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2022.naacl-main.78/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.78",
    pages = "1063--1074",
    abstract = "In empathetic conversations, humans express their empathy to others with empathetic intents. However, most existing empathetic conversational methods suffer from a lack of empathetic intents, which leads to monotonous empathy. To address the bias of the empathetic intents distribution between empathetic dialogue models and humans, we propose a novel model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent empathetic intents, EmpHi for short. Precisely, EmpHi learns the distribution of potential empathetic intents with a discrete latent variable, then combines both implicit and explicit intent representation to generate responses with various empathetic intents. Experiments show that EmpHi outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on both automatic and human evaluation. Moreover, the case studies demonstrate the high interpretability and outstanding performance of our model."
}