Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction
and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to
be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In
addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an important
role in empathetic conversations. To this end, we propose a new task towards
persona-based empathetic conversations and present the first empirical study on
the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Specifically, we first present
a novel large-scale multi-domain dataset for persona-based empathetic
conversations. We then propose CoBERT, an efficient BERT-based response
selection model that obtains the state-of-the-art performance on our dataset.
Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of persona
on empathetic responding. Notably, our results show that persona improves
empathetic responding more when CoBERT is trained on empathetic conversations
than non-empathetic ones, establishing an empirical link between persona and
empathy in human conversations.

本文提出了一个新任务，即基于角色的移情对话，并首次对角色对移情反应的影响进行了实证研究。作者提供了一份新的大规模多领域数据集，使用高效的 CoBERT 模型进行回答选择，实验证明，当 CoBERT 模型基于移情对话训练时，角色更有助于提高移情反应，从而为人类对话中的角色和移情之间建立了经验证据。