Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations
Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Pang Lam · 2023
Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation.In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation.Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types.Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions.The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems.In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixedinitiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a largescale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses.Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.