SERI: SkEtching-Reasoning-Integrating Progressive Workflow for Empathetic Response Generation

Empathy is a key ability for a human-like dialogue system. Inspired by social psychology, empathy includes both affective and cognitive aspects. Previous works on this topic have merely focused on recognizing emotions or modeling cognition with commonsense knowledge. Nevertheless, the generated results of these works still have a big gap with human-like empathetic responses. In this paper, we propose SERI, a SkEtching-Reasoning-Integrating framework for empathetic response generation. In particular, we define an empathy planner to capture and reason about multi-source information that considers cognition and affection. Further, we introduce a dynamic integrator module that allows the model dynamically select the appropriate information to generate empathetic responses. Experimental results on EmpatheticDialogue show that our method outperforms competitive baselines and generates responses with higher diversity and cognitive empathy levels.