EmpGAN: Multi-resolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Conventional emotional dialogue system focuses on generating emotion-rich replies. Studies on emotional intelligence suggest that constructing a more empathetic dialogue system, which is sensitive to the users' expressed emotion, is a crucial step towards a more humanized human-machine conversation. However, obstacles to establishing such an empathetic conversational system are still far beyond current progress: 1) Simply considering the sentence-level emotions while neglecting the more precise token-level emotions may lead to insufficient emotion perceptivity. 2) Merely relying on the dialogue history but overlooking the potential of user feedback for the generated responses further aggravates the insufficient emotion perceptivity deficiencies. To address the above challenges, we propose the EmpGAN, a multi-resolution adversarial empathetic dialogue generation model to generate more appropriate and empathetic responses. To capture the nuances of user feelings sufficiently, EmpGAN generates responses by jointly taking both the coarse-grained sentence-level and fine-grained token-level emotions into account. Moreover, an interactive adversarial learning framework is introduced to further identify whether the generated responses evoke emotion perceptivity in dialogues regarding both the dialogue history and user feedback. Experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by a significant margin in terms of both content quality as well as the emotion perceptivity. In particular, the distinctiveness on the DailyDialog dataset is increased up to 129%.