Conference Paper Published

Emstremo: Adapting Emotional Support Response with Enhanced Emotion-Strategy Integrated Selection

Li, J., Peng, B., & Hsu, Y. Y. (2024). Emstremo: Adapting Emotional Support Response with Enhanced Emotion-Strategy Integrated Selection. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 5794-5805.

URL: https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.514

Abstract

To provide effective support, it is essential for a skilled supporter to emotionally resonate with the help-seeker's current emotional state. In conversational interactions, this emotional alignment is further influenced by the comforting strategies employed by the supporter. Different strategies guide the interlocutors to align their emotions in nuanced patterns. However, the incorporation of strategy into emotional alignment in the context of emotional support agents remains underexplored. To address this limitation, we propose an improved emotional support agent called Emstremo. Emstremo aims to achieve strategic control of emotional alignment by perceiving and responding to the user's emotions. Our system's state-of-the-art performance emphasizes the importance of integrating emotions and strategies in modeling conversations that provide emotional support. (The code for Emstremo is available at https://github.com/CN-Eyetk/Emstremo).

Keywords

emotion state, emotion-strategy integration, emotional support conversation, response generation, support-strategy