Empathetic dialogue is an indispensable part of building harmonious social relationships and contributes to the development of a helpful AI. Previous approaches are mainly based on fine small-scale language models. With the advent of ChatGPT, the application effect of large language models (LLMs) in this field has attracted great attention. This work empirically investigates the performance of LLMs in generating empathetic responses and proposes three improvement methods of semantically similar in-context learning, two-stage interactive generation, and combination with the knowledge base. Extensive experiments show that LLMs can significantly benefit from our proposed methods and is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both automatic and human evaluations. Additionally, we explore the possibility of GPT-4 simulating human evaluators.

From pre-trained language model (PLM) to large language model (LLM), the field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed steep performance gains and wide practical uses. The evaluation of a research field guides its direction of improvement. However, LLMs are extremely hard to thoroughly evaluate for two reasons. First of all, traditional NLP tasks become inadequate due to the excellent performance of LLM. Secondly, existing evaluation tasks are difficult to keep up with the wide range of applications in real-world scenarios. To tackle these problems, existing works proposed various benchmarks to better evaluate LLMs. To clarify the numerous evaluation tasks in both academia and industry, we investigate multiple papers concerning LLM evaluations. We summarize 4 core competencies of LLM, including reasoning, knowledge, reliability, and safety. For every competency, we introduce its definition, corresponding benchmarks, and metrics. Under this competency architecture, similar tasks are combined to reflect corresponding ability, while new tasks can also be easily added into the system. Finally, we give our suggestions on the future direction of LLM's evaluation.

Towards human-like dialogue systems, current emotional dialogue In the task of open-domain dialogue generation, emotional dialogue approaches jointly model emotion and semantics with a unified aims to generate responses involving the perception and expression neural network. This strategy tends to generate safe responses of proper emotions. A large number of studies [30, 35, 40] have due to the mutual restriction between emotion and semantics, and demonstrated that emotional dialogue can significantly improve requires the rare large-scale emotion-annotated dialogue corpus. Inspired users' satisfaction in a human-machine conversation. Moreover, by the "think twice" behavior in human intelligent dialogue, building a dialogue system with human emotions is one of the we propose a two-stage conversational agent for the generation of ultimate goals of artificial intelligence.

Empathetic dialogue is a human-like behavior that requires the perception of both affective factors (e.g., emotion status) and cognitive factors (e.g., cause of the emotion). Besides concerning emotion status in early work, the latest approaches study emotion causes in empathetic dialogue. These approaches focus on understanding and duplicating emotion causes in the context to show empathy for the speaker. However, instead of only repeating the contextual causes, the real empathic response often demonstrate a logical and emotion-centered transition from the causes in the context to those in the responses. In this work, we propose an emotion cause transition graph to explicitly model the natural transition of emotion causes between two adjacent turns in empathetic dialogue. With this graph, the concept words of the emotion causes in the next turn can be predicted and used by a specifically designed concept-aware decoder to generate the empathic response. Automatic and human experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method produces more empathetic, coherent, informative, and specific responses than existing models.