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Title: I Know the Feeling: Learning to Converse with Empathy

Paper content:
Beyond understanding what is being discussed, human communication requires an awareness of what someone is feeling.
One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill that is trivial for humans.
Research in this area is made difficult by the paucity of suitable publicly available datasets both for emotion and dialogues.
This work proposes a new task for empathetic dialogue generation and EmpatheticDialogues, a dataset of 25k conversations grounded in emotional situations to facilitate training and evaluating dialogue systems.
Our experiments indicate that dialogue models that use our dataset are perceived to be more empathetic by human evaluators, while improving on other metrics as well (e.g. perceived relevance of responses, BLEU scores), compared to models merely trained on large-scale Internet conversation data.
We also present empirical comparisons of several ways to improve the performance of a given model by leveraging existing models or datasets without requiring lengthy re-training of the full model.
Natural communication is frequently prompted by people sharing their feelings or circumstances.
As examples, a recent study found that 80% of Twitter users seem to post mostly about themselves BID28 , and ELIZA BID44 , one of the earliest chatbots developed, focused on asking its conversational partners why they were feeling a certain way.
Interacting in these conversations requires reacting to what people share with an understanding of others' implied feelings.
For instance, while the crossed-out response in FIG0 is topically relevant, "Congrats! That's great!" is more natural because it acknowledges the underlying feelings of accomplishment.
Responding to people in a way that is empathetic or that acknowledges how the other person feels is a desirable trait for a dialogue agent, but still a nontrivial communicative skill.
It is also currently difficult to measure.
Although recent work has used large-scale corpora to train reasonably fluent and engaging dialogue agents (e.g. BID24 ), existing chitchat dialogue benchmarks are not designed to capture whether those agents are responding in an empathetic way to implicit emotional cues.
This may indeed be unlikely, given that the sources of Internet conversation data used for training are known to harbor aggressive and callous responses BID0 .This
works aims to make it easier to evaluate machines' ability to respond in an empathetic way. We introduce
a new task for dialogue systems to respond to people discussing everyday situations, based on EMPATHETICDIALOGUES, a novel dataset with 25k personal dialogues. Each dialogue
is grounded in a specific situation where a speaker was feeling a given emotion, with a listener responding. The dataset is
larger and contains a more extensive set of emotions than many similar emotion prediction datasets from other text domains such as BID34 , BID39 , BID26 , and BID11 . Previous dialogue
datasets of a similar scale that include emotion labels BID19 BID11 come from crawled Table 1 : Two examples from EMPATHETICDIALOGUES training set. The first worker
(the speaker) is given an emotion label and writes their own description of a situation when they've felt that way. Then, the speaker
tells their story in a conversation with a second worker (the listener).Label: Afraid Situation
: Speaker felt this when... "I've been hearing noises around the house at night" Conversation: Speaker: I've been hearing some strange noises around the house at night. Listener: oh no! That's
scary! What do you
think it is?
Speaker: I don't know, that
's what's making me anxious. Listener: I'm sorry to hear
that. I wish I could help you figure
it out Label: Proud Situation: Speaker felt this when... "I finally got that promotion at work! I have tried so hard for so long to get it!" Conversation: Speaker: I finally
got promoted today at work! Listener: Congrats! That's great
! Speaker: Thank you
! I've been trying
to get it for a while
now! Listener: That is quite an accomplishment
and you should be proud! conversations extracted from settings that are quite different from a one-on-one conversation (educational dialogues for English learners for DAILYDIALOG, public social media content for BID11 ) and cover either a very limited or a very imbalanced set of emotions: only ≈ 5% of the DailyDialog utterances have a label other than 'none' or 'happy', and BID11 only labels 'happy', 'sad', and 'angry'. The open resource we propose consists of
crowdsourced one-on-one conversations, and covers a large set of emotions in a balanced way.We then examine how to train a dialogue system that is more adept at responding to emotional cues. While a rule-based system can be built around
mapping predicted emotions to responses, end-toend dialogue systems relying on neural networks and trained on conversation corpora BID36 BID42 BID35 BID3 BID24 BID48 offer the promise of better generalization to new contexts. Through an extensive set of experiments, we show
that fine-tuning a dialogue agent on our dataset results in better performance on a novel empathetic dialogue task.The pretraining of the dialogue agent on Internet conversation data is the most time-consuming step of this pipeline, by an order of magnitude. To make it easier for practitioners to improve performance
of a model on the empathetic task with minimal re-training while re-using existing resources, we compare various ways of supplementing a pretrained model with additional representations from external tasks, and show that even simplistic schemes can lead to better performance. The contributions of this work are thus threefold: 1) we release
a novel empathetic dialogue dataset as a new benchmark
; 2) we show that using this dataset for training can improve the performance
of an end-to-end dialogue system on empathetic dialogue; and 3) we compare multiple ways to further improve performance with combined representations
while not requiring onerous re-training.
We introduce a new dataset of 25k dialogues grounded in situations prompted by specific emotion labels.
Our experiments show that using this dataset to fine-tune conversation models leads to responses that are evaluated by humans as more empathetic, and that simple schemes to augment a fine-tuned model with an external pretrained classifier can lead to better performance without requiring onerous retraining.
Future work will investigate how to use this dataset to model the Speaker, and how to integrate empathetic responding into more general dialogue when, for example, the needs for empathy have to be balanced with staying on topic or providing information (see Table 6 ).Other
possible directions would be to see if this data can serve as additional weakly supervised data for more complex emotion-related tasks that look at emotion evolution or causality BID10 BID33 . We hope
that our results and dataset will stimulate more research in the important direction of making dialog systems more empathetic. In TAB5
, we include the exact percentage of emotion labels for the situation descriptions in our final dataset.

assistant: text: We improve existing dialogue systems for responding to people sharing personal stories, incorporating emotion prediction representations and also release a new benchmark and dataset of empathetic dialogues.