An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

Empathetic response generation aims to comprehend the cognitive and emotional states in dialogue utterances and generate proper responses. Psychological theories posit that comprehending emotional and cognitive states necessitates iteratively capturing and understanding associated words across dialogue utterances. However, existing approaches regard dialogue utterances as either a long sequence or independent utterances for comprehension, which are prone to overlook the associated words between them. To address this issue, we propose an Iterative Associative Memory Model (IAMM) for empathetic response generation. Specifically, we employ a novel second-order interaction attention mechanism to iteratively capture vital associated words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module (for storing associated words), thereby accurately and nuancedly comprehending the utterances. We conduct experiments on the Empathetic-Dialogue dataset. Both automatic and human evaluations validate the efficacy of the model. Variant experiments on LLMs also demonstrate that attending to associated words improves empathetic comprehension and expression.

Authors 7

1. Yang Zhou

   Fuzhou University

   Affiliation as printed

   College of Computer and Data Science , Fuzhou University , Fuzhou , China;

2. Zhaochun Ren Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

3. Yu‐Feng Wang

   Fuzhou University

   Affiliation as printed

   College of Computer and Data Science , Fuzhou University , Fuzhou , China;

4. Chao Chen

   Harbin Institute of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Computer Science and Technology , Harbin Institute of Technology , Shenzhen , China

5. Haizhou Sun
   Affiliation as printed

   H. Sun is with SmartMore ;

6. Xiaofei Zhu

   Chongqing University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   College of Computer Science and Technology , Chongqing University of Technology , Chongqing , China

7. Xiangwen Liao

   Fuzhou University

   Affiliation as printed

   College of Computer and Data Science , Fuzhou University , Fuzhou , China;