Empathetic Response Generation With Self and Other-Imagine Graph

Empathy, an essential quality in daily human conversations, plays a crucial role in dialogue systems. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest among researchers in developing empathetic response generation. However, existing methods often ignore the high-level process of generating empathy-imagination, which involves consciously putting oneself in the other person's shoes during a conversation. To solve this critical problem, we propose a novel approach called EmpSOI that adopts self and other-imagine to generate empathetic responses. Specifically, we design two heterogeneous graphs to incorporate the two different imaginative perspectives: the self-imagine perspective and the other-imagine perspective, which enables the model to empathize with the user from different perspectives. Besides, we incorporate a gating mechanism to regulate the contribution of imagination information from these two perspectives during the response generation stage. The mechanism enables the model to differentiate between two imaginative perspectives. The results of extensive automatic and manual experiments illustrate the advantages of our model compared to other comparative models in perceiving the user's emotional state and generating empathetic responses.