Abstract
There has been a growing interest in empathetic dialogue systems (EDS) that demonstrate emotional and social intelligence within the natural language processing (NLP) community. The ability to recognize users' emotional states, sentiments, and behaviors and respond accordingly is crucial for effective communication. While this comes naturally to humans, embedding such human-like capabilities into conversational systems presents a formidable challenge. Since empathetic dialogue systems encompass a broad range of human characteristics, newcomers often find it challenging to begin. As a result, this tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive overview of empathetic dialogue systems. The tutorial's scope encompasses various aspects, including the historical context, development, available datasets, techniques (including cutting-edge approaches), methods for evaluation, and recent trends and challenges in empathetic dialogue systems. Lastly, it highlights some of the limitations and deficiencies in existing techniques to guide future research in this field.
Outline
The tutorial is organized as follows:
- Concepts of empathy and its need in dialogue systems
- Emotion, sentiment, emotion cause, intent, persona, and politeness in empathetic dialogue systems
- Relevance of external knowledge and multimodal information in empathetic dialogue systems
- Empathetic dialogue systems for social good applications - Persuasion and Therapy
- Conclusion and Future Directions
Presenters
Priyanshu Priya
Ph.D Scholar Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India
Mauajama Firdaus
PostDoctoral Researcher University of Alberta, Canada
Gopendra Vikram Singh
Ph.D Scholar Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India
Dr. Asif Ekbal
Associate Professor Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India Webpage Google Scholar DBLP
Priyanshu Priya
Ph.D Scholar
Priyanshu Priya is a Ph.D. Scholar at the AI-NLP-ML Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna, India. Her research interests include Natural Language Processing with a primary focus on modeling politeness in conversational systems. She has received the prestigious Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India for pursuing Ph.D at IIT Patna.
Mauajama Firdaus
PostDoctoral Researcher
Mauajama Firdaus is a PostDoc researcher in the Department of Computer Science in University of Alberta, Canada. She completed her PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India. in 2021. Her main area of research is Natural Language Processing and Dialogue Generation. She has published papers in various peer-reviewed conferences and journals of international repute.
Gopendra Vikram Singh
Ph.D Scholar
Gopendra Vikram Singh is currently a Research Scholar with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna, India. His research interests include natural language processing, with an emphasis on emotion recognition and sentiment analysis in conversations.
Dr. Asif Ekbal
Associate Professor
Dr. Asif Ekbal is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna. His research interest include Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Text Mining and Machine Learning applications. He is an awardee of the Best Innovative Project award from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), Visvesvaraya Young Faculty Research (YFRF) Award from the Govt. of India and JSPS Invitation Fellowship from the Govt. of Japan.