Papers › Emotion-Aware Transformer Encoder for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Emotion-Aware Transformer Encoder for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

24 Apr 20222021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW) 2021 10arXiv:2204.11320archive 2025-07-28

Raman Goel, Seba Susan, Sachin Vashisht, Armaan Dhanda

Modern day conversational agents are trained to emulate the manner in which humans communicate. To emotionally bond with the user, these virtual agents need to be aware of the affective state of the user. Transformers are the recent state of the art in sequence-to-sequence learning that involves training an encoder-decoder model with word embeddings from utterance-response pairs. We propose an emotion-aware transformer encoder for capturing the emotional quotient in the user utterance in order to generate human-like empathetic responses. The contributions of our paper are as follows: 1) An emotion detector module trained on the input utterances determines the affective state of the user in the initial phase 2) A novel transformer encoder is proposed that adds and normalizes the word embedding with emotion embedding thereby integrating the semantic and affective aspects of the input utterance 3) The encoder and decoder stacks belong to the Transformer-XL architecture which is the recent state of the art in language modeling. Experimentation on the benchmark Facebook AI empathetic dialogue dataset confirms the efficacy of our model from the higher BLEU-4 scores achieved for the generated responses as compared to existing methods. Emotionally intelligent virtual agents are now a reality and inclusion of affect as a modality in all human-machine interfaces is foreseen in the immediate future.

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Code

r9729104234/Emotion-Aware-Transformer-Encoder-for-Empathetic-Dialogue-Generation officialmentioned in paper report

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Tasks

Decoder Dialogue Generation Language Modeling Language Modelling Word Embeddings

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

Task	Dataset	Model	Metric	Value	Rank at snapshot	Leaderboard	Report
Empathetic Response Generation	EmpatheticDialogues	Emotion-aware transformer encoder (Transformer-XL)	BLEU	0.225	#2 of 2	Archive leaderboard	report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AWARE Adam Adaptive Input Representations Adaptive Softmax Attention Cosine Annealing Dense Connections Dropout Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing Multi-Head Attention ReLU Residual Connection Softmax Transformer-XL Variational Dropout

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