Empathy is an important characteristic to be considered when building a more intelligent and humanized dialogue agent. However, existing methods did not fully comprehend empathy as a complex process involving three aspects: cognition, affection and behavior. In this paper, we propose CAB, a novel framework that takes a comprehensive perspective of cognition, affection and behavior to generate empathetic responses. For cognition, we build paths between critical keywords in the dialogue by leveraging external knowledge. This is because keywords in a dialogue are the core of sentences. Building the logic relationship between keywords, which is overlooked by the majority of existing works, can improve the understanding of keywords and contextual logic, thus enhance the cognitive ability. For affection, we capture the emotional dependencies with dual latent variables that contain both interlocutors' emotions. The reason is that considering both interlocutors' emotions simultaneously helps to learn the emotional dependencies. For behavior, we use appropriate dialogue acts to guide the dialogue generation to enhance the empathy expression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our multi-perspective model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in both automatic and manual evaluation.

Empathy, which is widely used in psychological counselling, is a key trait of everyday human conversations. Equipped with commonsense knowledge, current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on capturing implicit emotion within dialogue context, where the emotions are treated as a static variable throughout the conversations. However, emotions change dynamically between utterances, which makes previous works difficult to perceive the emotion flow and predict the correct emotion of the target response, leading to inappropriate response. Furthermore, simply importing commonsense knowledge without harmonization may trigger the conflicts between knowledge and emotion, which confuse the model to choose incorrect information to guide the generation process. To address the above problems, we propose a Serial Encoding and Emotion-Knowledge interaction (SEEK) method for empathetic dialogue generation. We use a fine-grained encoding strategy which is more sensitive to the emotion dynamics (emotion flow) in the conversations to predict the emotion-intent characteristic of response. Besides, we design a novel framework to model the interaction between knowledge and emotion to generate more sensible response. Extensive experiments on EmpatheticDialogues demonstrate that SEEK outperforms the strong baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations.

One challenge for dialogue agents is to recognize feelings of the conversation partner and respond accordingly. In this work, RoBERTa-GPT2 is proposed for empathetic dialogue generation, where the pre-trained auto-encoding RoBERTa is utilised as encoder and the pre-trained auto-regressive GPT-2 as decoder. With the combination of the pre-trained RoBERTa and GPT-2, our model realizes a new state-of-the-art emotion accuracy. To enable the empathetic ability of RoBERTa-GPT2 model, we propose a commonsense knowledge and emotional concepts extractor, in which the commonsensible and emotional concepts of dialogue context are extracted for the GPT-2 decoder. The experiment results demonstrate that the empathetic dialogue generation benefits from both pre-trained encoder-decoder architecture and external knowledge.