Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Understand

Lack of external knowledge makes empathetic dialogue systems difficult to perceive implicit emotions and learn emotional interactions from limited dialogue history.

• To address the above problems, we propose to leverage external knowledge, including commonsense knowledge and emotional lexical knowledge, to explicitly understand and express emotions in empathetic dialogue generation.
• We first enrich the dialogue history by jointly interacting with external knowledge and construct an emotional context graph.
• Then we learn emotional context representations from the knowledge-enriched emotional context graph and distill emotional signals, which are the prerequisites to predicate emotions expressed in responses.