EmpDG: Multiresolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Abstract

A humanized dialogue system is expected to generate empathetic replies, which should be sensitive to the users' expressed emotion. The task of empathetic dialogue generation is proposed to address this problem. The essential challenges lie in accurately capturing the nuances of human emotion and considering the potential of user feedback, which are overlooked by the majority of existing work. In response to this problem, we propose a multi-resolution adversarial model -- EmpDG, to generate more empathetic responses. EmpDG exploits both the coarse-grained dialogue-level and fine-grained token-level emotions, the latter of which helps to better capture the nuances of user emotion. In addition, we introduce an interactive adversarial learning framework which exploits the user feedback, to identify whether the generated responses evoke emotion perceptivity in dialogues. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both content quality and emotion perceptivity.