Due to the lack of human resources for mental health support, there is an increasing demand for employing conversational agents for support. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support. As previous studies have demonstrated that seekers' persona is an important factor for effective support, we investigate whether there are benefits to modeling such information in dialogue models for support. In this paper, our empirical analysis verifies that persona has an important impact on emotional support. Therefore, we propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers' persona. We first train a model for inferring the seeker's persona from the conversation history. Accordingly, we propose PAL, a model that leverages persona information and, in conjunction with our strategy-based controllable generation method, provides personalized emotional support. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that our proposed model, PAL, achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baselines on the studied benchmark. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/chengjl19/PAL.

个人之间日常谈话的关键特征是能够向他人表达同理心，并探索实施同理心的方法是对人类对话系统的关键步骤。本主题的先前方法主要集中在检测和利用用户的情绪以产生同理反应。但是，由于同情包括感情和认知的两个方面，我们认为除了识别用户的情绪之外，还应该考虑对用户情况的认知理解。为此，我们提出了一种新的方法来实现同志响应生成，它利用致辞来绘制更多信息的信息，并使用这些附加信息来进一步增强所生成的响应中的同情表达。我们在EmpatheticDialogues上评估我们的方法，这是一个广泛使用的基准数据集，用于致力于响应生成。经验结果表明，我们的方法在自动和人类评估中表明了基线模型，可以产生更丰富的信息和致力学的反应。

Emotional support conversation aims at reducing the emotional distress of the help-seeker, which is a new and challenging task. It requires the system to explore the cause of help-seeker's emotional distress and understand their psychological intention to provide supportive responses. However, existing methods mainly focus on the sequential contextual information, ignoring the hierarchical relationships with the global cause and local psychological intention behind conversations, thus leads to a weak ability of emotional support. In this paper, we propose a Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network to capture the multi-source information (global cause, local intentions and dialog history) and model hierarchical relationships between them, which consists of a multi-source encoder, a hierarchical graph reasoner, and a global-guide decoder. Furthermore, a novel training objective is designed to monitor semantic information of the global cause. Experimental results on the emotional support conversation dataset, ESConv, confirm that the proposed GLHG has achieved the state-of-the-art performance on the automatic and human evaluations. The code will be released in here \footnote{\small{~https://github.com/pengwei-iie/GLHG}}.

Expressing empathy is important in everyday conversations, and exploring how empathy arises is crucial in automatic response generation. Most previous approaches consider only a single factor that affects empathy. However, in practice, empathy generation and expression is a very complex and dynamic psychological process. A listener needs to find out events which cause a speaker's emotions (emotion cause extraction), project the events into some experience (knowledge extension), and express empathy in the most appropriate way (communication mechanism). To this end, we propose a novel approach, which integrates the three components - emotion cause, knowledge graph, and communication mechanism for empathetic response generation. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that incorporating the key components generates more informative and empathetic responses.

Empathy is a vital factor that contributes to mutual understanding, and joint problem-solving. In recent years, a growing number of studies have recognized the benefits of empathy and started to incorporate empathy in conversational systems. We refer to this topic as empathetic conversational systems. To identify the critical gaps and future opportunities in this topic, this paper examines this rapidly growing field using five review dimensions: (i) conceptual empathy models and frameworks, (ii) adopted empathy-related concepts, (iii) datasets and algorithmic techniques developed, (iv) evaluation strategies, and (v) state-of-the-art approaches. The findings show that most studies have centered on the use of the EMPATHETICDIALOGUES dataset, and the text-based modality dominates research in this field. Studies mainly focused on extracting features from the messages of the users and the conversational systems, with minimal emphasis on user modeling and profiling. Notably, studies that have incorporated emotion causes, external knowledge, and affect matching in the response generation models, have obtained significantly better results. For implementation in diverse real-world settings, we recommend that future studies should address key gaps in areas of detecting and authenticating emotions at the entity level, handling multimodal inputs, displaying more nuanced empathetic behaviors, and encompassing additional dialogue system features.

在本文中，我们介绍了基于大型预训练的语言模型（PLM）pangu-alpha（Zeng等，2021）的中国预训练的开放域对话生成模型。与其他对大量对话数据进行培训的预训练的对话模型不同，我们旨在通过继承PLM的有价值的语言能力和知识来构建强大的对话模型，并以相对较少的数据和计算成本构建强大的对话模型。为此，我们训练大型PLM Pangu-Alpha的Pangu-bot，该机器人已被证明在各种中国自然语言任务上表现出色。我们研究了pangu-bot产生的响应的不同方面，包括响应质量，知识和安全性。我们表明，Pangu-Bot优于最先进的中国对话系统（CDIALGPT（Wang等，2020），Eva（Zhou等，2021），EVA2.0（Gu等，2022）） W.R.T.以上三个方面。我们还证明，可以轻松地部署pangu-bot，以在没有进一步训练的情况下产生情感反应。在整个经验分析中，我们还指出，Pangu-bot响应质量，知识正确性和安全性仍然远非完美，进一步的探索对于建立可靠且智能的对话系统是必不可少的。我们的型号和代码将在https://github.com/huawei-noah/pretretaining-language-model/tree/master/master/pangu-bot上提供。

缺乏外部知识使同志对话系统难以察觉隐含的情绪，并从有限的对话历史上学习情绪相互作用。为了解决上述问题，我们建议利用外部知识，包括致命知识和情绪词汇知识，以明确了解和表达在同情对话中的情绪。我们首先通过与外部知识共同互动并构建情感语境图来丰富对话史。然后，我们从知识丰富的情绪上下文图和蒸馏情绪信号中学习情绪背景陈述，这是在反应中表达的谓词情绪的先决条件。最后，为了产生同志反应，我们提出了一种情绪跨关注机制来从情绪上下文图中学习情绪依赖。在基准数据集上进行的广泛实验验证了该方法的有效性。此外，我们发现通过与正交工作的预先训练的模型集成，可以进一步提高我们的方法的性能。

建立一个社会智能代理人涉及许多挑战，其中一个是教导代理人以人类的价值交谈。然而，在对话系统的区域中仍然可以解读价值驱动的聊天聊天。大多数现有数据集重点关注致命的推理或社会规范建模。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个名为ValueNet的新的大型人类价值数据集，其中包含21,374个文本情景的人为态度。数据集在十维中组织，符合跨文化研究中的基本人类价值理论。我们进一步开发了ValueNet的基于变换器的值回归模型，以学习公用事业分配。综合实证结果表明，学习的价值模型可以使广泛的对话任务受益。例如，通过教授具有钢筋学习的生成代理和价值模型的奖励，我们的方法在个性化对话生成数据集中获得最先进的性能：Persona-Chat。具有额外特征的价值，现有的情感识别模型使得能够在上下文中捕捉丰富的人类情绪，这进一步提高了IncatheticDialogues数据集中的致力学响应生成性能。据我们所知，Valuenet是人类价值建模的第一个大型文本数据集，我们是第一个尝试将价值模型结合到情感智能对话系统中的人。数据集可在https://liang-qiu.github.io/valuenet/上获得。

Personalized chatbots focus on endowing the chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users and further act as personal assistants. Previous studies have explored generating implicit user profiles from the user's dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. However, these studies only use the response generation loss to train the entire model, thus it is prone to suffer from the problem of data sparsity. Besides, they overemphasize the final generated response's quality while ignoring the correlations and fusions between the user's dialogue history, leading to rough data representations and performance degradation. To tackle these problems, we propose a self-supervised learning framework MCP for capturing better representations from users' dialogue history for personalized chatbots. Specifically, we apply contrastive sampling methods to leverage the supervised signals hidden in user dialog history, and generate the pre-training samples for enhancing the model. We design three pre-training tasks based on three types of contrastive pairs from user dialogue history, namely response pairs, sequence augmentation pairs, and user pairs. We pre-train the utterance encoder and the history encoder towards the contrastive objectives and use these pre-trained encoders for generating user profiles while personalized response generation. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show a significant improvement in our proposed model MCP compared with the existing methods.

We present SODA: the first publicly available, million-scale high-quality social dialogue dataset. Using SODA, we train COSMO: a generalizable conversation agent outperforming previous best-performing agents on both in- and out-of-domain datasets. In contrast to most existing crowdsourced, small-scale dialogue corpora, we distill 1.5M socially-grounded dialogues from a pre-trained language model (InstructGPT; Ouyang et al., 2022). Dialogues are distilled by contextualizing social commonsense knowledge from a knowledge graph (Atomic10x; West et al., 2022). Human evaluation shows that dialogues in SODA are more consistent, specific, and (surprisingly) natural than prior human-authored datasets - e.g., DailyDialog (Li et al., 2017), BlendedSkillTalk (Smith et al., 2020). In addition, extensive evaluations show that COSMO is significantly more natural and consistent on unseen datasets than best-performing dialogue models - e.g., GODEL (Peng et al., 2022), BlenderBot (Roller et al., 2021), DialoGPT (Zhang et al., 2020). Furthermore, it is sometimes even preferred to the original human-written gold responses. We make our data, models, and code public.

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.

移情是一种自然体现在人类对话中的特征。从理论上讲，慈善反应的诞生是由于认知和情感之间有意识的对准和相互作用而产生的。但是，现有作品仅依赖于单一的情感方面或独立的认知和感情模型，从而限制了产生的反应的同理心能力。为此，基于常识性认知图和情感概念图，构建了涉及常识性和概念知识的构建，我们设计了一种两级策略，以使粗粒度（在上下文认知和上下文情绪状态之间）和细粒度（在每个特定之间）认知和相应的情感反应）认知和情感，以善解人意（案例）。广泛的实验表明，在自动和人类评估方面，案例的表现优于最先进的基线。我们的代码将发布。

Chit-chat models are known to have several problems: they lack specificity, do not display a consistent personality and are often not very captivating. In this work we present the task of making chit-chat more engaging by conditioning on profile information. We collect data and train models to (i) condition on their given profile information; and (ii) information about the person they are talking to, resulting in improved dialogues, as measured by next utterance prediction. Since (ii) is initially unknown, our model is trained to engage its partner with personal topics, and we show the resulting dialogue can be used to predict profile information about the interlocutors.

个性化对话代理对于对话系统非常重要，以产生更具体，一致，并从事和吸引力的反应。然而，大多数当前对话的个性化方法依赖于推理期间的明确人物描述，严重限制其应用。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，该方法将根据对话历史来预测人物信息，以个性化对话代理而不依赖于推理期间的任何明确的人格描述。 Personachat数据集上的实验结果表明，当在对话剂的预测轮廓上调节（即“自身角色”）时，所提出的方法可以提高所产生的响应的一致性，并在预测的角色调节时改善所产生的响应的接合对话伙伴（即“他们的角色”）。我们还发现培训的角色预测模型可以成功转移到其他数据集，并帮助生成更相关的响应。

人类通常通过利用关于他们正在交谈的人的主题和背景信息的先验知识来进行对话。然而，现有的会话代理和数据集不考虑此类综合信息，因此它们有一个限制生成知识和人格正确融合的话语。为解决此问题，我们介绍了一个呼叫进行定制对话（焦点）数据集，其中包括用户的角色和维基百科知识建立了自定义答案。为了评估预先训练的语言模型的信息和定制话语的能力，我们利用BART和GPT-2以及基于变压器的模型。我们评估了他们的生成能力，自动分数并对人类评估进行定性结果。我们仔细检查模型是否反映了我们提出的两个子任务，人物接地（PG）和知识接地（KG）的充分人物和知识。此外，我们表明我们的数据的话语通过接地质量评估来构建具有正确的知识和角色。

In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

Conversational AI has become an increasingly prominent and practical application of machine learning. However, existing conversational AI techniques still suffer from various limitations. One such limitation is a lack of well-developed methods for incorporating auxiliary information that could help a model understand conversational context better. In this paper, we explore how persona-based information could help improve the quality of response generation in conversations. First, we provide a literature review focusing on the current state-of-the-art methods that utilize persona information. We evaluate two strong baseline methods, the Ranking Profile Memory Network and the Poly-Encoder, on the NeurIPS ConvAI2 benchmark dataset. Our analysis elucidates the importance of incorporating persona information into conversational systems. Additionally, our study highlights several limitations with current state-of-the-art methods and outlines challenges and future research directions for advancing personalized conversational AI technology.

许多古典童话，小说和剧本都利用对话来推进故事情节并建立角色。我们提出了第一个研究，以探索机器是否可以理解和产生故事中的对话，这需要捕获不同角色的特征及其之间的关系。为此，我们提出了两项​​新任务，包括蒙版对话生成和对话演讲者的认可，即分别产生对话转弯和预测说话者的指定对话转弯。我们构建了一个新的数据集拨号故事，该数据集由105K中国故事组成，其中包含大量对话，以支持评估。我们通过对拨号故事进行自动和手动评估测试现有模型来显示提出的任务的困难。此外，我们建议学习明确的角色表示，以提高这些任务的绩效。广泛的实验和案例研究表明，我们的方法可以产生更连贯和信息丰富的对话，并获得比强基础更高的说话者识别精度。

We have a Christmas gift for Harry Potter fans all over the world. In this paper, we present Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD), a dataset that helps train Harry Potter-like dialogue agents. Such a task is typically viewed as a variant of personalized dialogue agents, but they differ significantly in three respects: 1) Harry lived in a virtual world of wizards, thus, real-world commonsense may not apply to Harry's conversations; 2) Harry's behavior is strongly linked to background information in conversations: the scene, its attributes and its relationship to other speakers; and 3) Such backgrounds are dynamically altered as the storyline goes on. The HPD dataset, as the first dataset to facilitate the study of dialogue agent construction for characters within a story, provides rich contextual information about each dialogue session such as scenes, character attributes, and relations. More importantly, all the background information will change over the course of the story. In addition, HPD could support both dialogue generation and retrieval tasks. We evaluate baselines such as Dialog-GPT and BOB to determine the extent to which they can generate Harry Potter-like responses. The experimental results disappoint us in that although the generated responses are fluent, they still seem out of character for Harry. Besides, we validate the current most robust dialogue agent, ChatGPT, which also can't generate plausible Harry-Potter-like responses in some cases, either. Our results suggest that there is much scope for future research.

良好的善解人意对话系统应首先跟踪并理解用户的情绪，然后以适当的情感回复。但是，目前对此任务的方法要么集中于提高对用户情绪的理解或提出更好的反应策略，而且很少有作品同时考虑这两种工作。我们的工作试图填补这一空缺。受到任务导向对话系统的启发，我们提出了一种具有情感感知对话管理的新颖善解人意的响应生成模型。情绪感知对话管理包含两个部分：（1）情绪状态跟踪保持当前用户的情绪状态，（2）善解人意的对话策略选择预测目标情绪和用户的意图，基于情绪状态跟踪的结果。然后，预测信息用于指导响应的产生。实验结果表明，与自动评估和人类评估下的几个基准相比，动态管理不同的信息可以帮助模型产生更多的移情反应。