The capacity of empathy is crucial to the success of open-domain dialog systems. Due to its nature of multi-dimensionality, there are various factors that relate to empathy expression, such as communication mechanism, dialog act and emotion. However, existing methods for empathetic response generation usually either consider only one empathy factor or ignore the hierarchical relationships between different factors, leading to a weak ability of empathy modeling. In this paper, we propose a multi-factor hierarchical framework, CoMAE, for empathetic response generation, which models the above three key factors of empathy expression in a hierarchical way. We show experimentally that our CoMAE-based model can generate more empathetic responses than previous methods. We also highlight the importance of hierarchical modeling of different factors through both the empirical analysis on a real-life corpus and the extensive experiments. Our codes and used data are available at https://github.com/chujiezheng/CoMAE.

本文提出了一种多因素分层框架CoMAE，用于模拟情感应答生成功能，实验表明，我们的模型比之前的方法表现更好，分层建模不同因素的重要性也得到了验证。

CoMAE：一种用于生成移情回应的多因素分层框架