Don’t Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awareness (2023)

Abstract: As a critical step to achieve human-like chatbots, empathetic response generation has attained increasing interests. Previous attempts are incomplete and not sufficient enough to elicit empathy because they only stay on the initial stage of empathy to automatically sense and simulate the feelings and thoughts of others via other-awareness. However, they ignore to include self-awareness to consider the own views of the self in their responses, which is a crucial process to achieve the empathy. To this end, we propose to generate Empathetic response with explicit Self-Other Awareness (EmpSOA). Specifically, three stages, self-other differentiation, self-other modulation and self-other generation, are devised to clearly maintain, regulate and inject the self-other aware information into the process of empathetic response generation. Both automatic and human evaluations on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of EmpSOA to generate more empathetic responses. Our source code will be publicly available.

## introduction empathy is a desirable trait of the engaging human conversation and is considered as the key step to human-like chatbots. in this paper, we focus on the task of empathetic response generation @xcite , which understands the feelings and situations of the user and responses properly. according to one of the most influential theories of empathy proposed by @xcite , empathy is the ability to sense the others' private world as if it were our own, but without losing the "as if" condition. previous works @xcite @xcite mainly focus on the prior part of the definition, which is referred as emotional contagion @xcite , and * corresponding author hi , i feel so lonely sometimes because all my friends live in a different country 😔 i am so sorry to hear that. 🤖 oh, i am sure you are lonely. maybe you can join some kind of club that lets you meet new friends? they automatically mimic the thoughts and feelings of the speaker to converge emotionally. however, emotional contagion is only the initial component that precedes empathy and what makes empathy distinct from emotion contagion is a critical process called self-other awareness @xcite . thus, it is not sufficient enough for previous attempts to convey empathy because they only perform the single other-awareness to perceive the emotion and situation from the other and generate responses coupled with the same perceived emotion. as shown in the left part of figure 1 , with other-awareness, the self succeed to feel the sadness of the other. but the complete emotional overlap would induce the self to reinforce such sadness with the response of so sorry to hear that, which is not the goal of empathy. and it is of great necessity to take the own view of the self into consideration to maintain the "as if" condition with a clear self-awareness, which is a conscious process to maintain and modulate the own views of the self during the empathetic interaction. in the right part of figure 1 , with the incorporation of the self-awareness, the self consciously holds in mind that this it not my own sad-ness and i am responsible to cheer you up. thus, the explicit self-other awareness plays pivotal roles in disentangling feelings and views of the self and the other, which constitutes a crucial perspective of empathy and largely contributes to generate more empathetic responses, especially when the other is in negative emotional states. to this end, we propose to generate empathetic response with explicit self-other awareness (empsoa). inspired by the conceptual framework of information flow involved in human empathy @xcite , we make such processes computable and abstract three stages in empsoa, named self-other differentiation (sod), self-other modulation (som) and self-other generation (sog). specifically, in sod, we construct two heterogeneous graphs with four types of nodes to maintain the self-awareness representation and other-awareness representation, respectively. among them, commonsense knowledge from comet @xcite is leveraged to manifest the fine-grained emotional and cognitive statuses of the self and the other. further, we dynamically control the contributions of the self-other awareness representations in som and inject them into the process of empathetic response generation in sog. experimental results of both automatic and manual evaluations on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of empsoa to generate more empathetic responses. the main contributions of this work are summarized as follows: ## conclusion and future work in this paper, we propose empsoa to generate empathetic responses via explicit self-other awareness. three stages including self-other differentiation (sod), self-other modulation (som) and self-other generation (sog) are devised to achieve this goal. experimental results on both automatic and human evaluation demonstrate the superiority of empsoa to generate more empathetic responses. in the future, we will explore the theory of selfother awareness in tasks that specified to elicit the positive emotion of the other.