Beyond understanding what is being discussed, human communication requires an awareness of what someone is feeling. One challenge for dialogue agents is being able to recognize feelings in the conversation partner and reply accordingly, a key communicative skill that is trivial for humans. Research in this area is made difficult by the paucity of large-scale publicly available datasets both for emotion and relevant dialogues. This work proposes a new task for empathetic dialogue generation and EmpatheticDialogues, a dataset of 25k conversations grounded in emotional contexts to facilitate training and evaluating dialogue systems. Our experiments indicate that models explicitly leveraging emotion predictions from previous utterances are perceived to be more empathetic by human evaluators, while improving on other metrics as well (e.g. perceived relevance of responses, BLEU scores).

本文提出了一个新的共情对话生成指标和一个基于具有情感情境的25k个会话的新数据集EmpatheticDialogues，实验表明使用我们的数据集的对话模型被人类评估员认为比仅在大规模互联网对话数据上训练的模型更具有移情能力，同时还通过实验比较了对情感回应进行的对话模型调整，利用现有模型或数据集而无需重新训练完整模型

面向共情的开放领域对话模型：新基准和数据集