Generating Empathetic Responses with a Large Scale Dialog Dataset

The task of empathetic response generation aims at generating syntactically correct and, more importantly, emotionally appropriate responses following previous dialog turns. Existing models either directly incorporate pre-defined emotion information to guide the response generation, or use deterministic rules to decide the response emotion, ignoring the subtle emotion interactions captured in human conversations. With the advent of advanced language models, it is possible to learn the nuanced emotional exchanges captured in natural language dialogs. To fully explore the range of emotions and dialog intents, it is important to curate a dataset large enough to shed light on the general understanding of human emotional interactions in our conversations. In this paper, we describe in detail the curation process of a large-scale dialog dataset where each utterance is labeled with one of 32 emotions and 9 intent categories. We then show how to build a multi-turn empathetic dialog model that performs well compared to its baselines over 6,000 human evaluated instances.