Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Models

Peixiang Zhong, Chen Zhang, Hao Wang, Yong Liu, Chunyan Miao


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.531
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6556–6566
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.531
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.531
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peixiang Zhong, Chen Zhang, Hao Wang, Yong Liu, and Chunyan Miao. 2020. Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Models. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6556–6566, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Models (Zhong et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.531.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938660
Code
 zhongpeixiang/PEC
Data
PEC