Empathetic Response Generation

Empathetic response generation aims to create computer-generated responses that demonstrate understanding and emotional support, mirroring human empathy in conversations. Current research focuses on improving models' ability to reason about the causes of emotions, aligning generated responses with desired empathy levels using reinforcement learning, and incorporating personality and diverse communication strategies. This field is significant for advancing human-computer interaction, particularly in applications like mental health support and building more emotionally intelligent AI systems, with recent work showing that large language models can even outperform humans in certain empathy benchmarks.