Emotional-Support-Conversation

Copyright © 2021 CoAI Group, Tsinghua University. All rights reserved. Data and codes are for academic research use only.

Data and codes for the ACL 2021 paper: Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems

If you use our codes or your research is related to our paper, please kindly cite our paper:

@inproceedings{liu-etal-2021-towards,
  title={Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems},
  author={Liu, Siyang  and 
    Zheng, Chujie  and 
    Demasi, Orianna  and 
    Sabour, Sahand  and 
    Li, Yu  and 
    Yu, Zhou  and 
    Jiang, Yong  and 
    Huang, Minlie},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year={2021}
}

Data

The corpus file is ESConv.json. We have collected more conversations with more problem topics. ESConv now contians 1,300 conversations with 10 topic problems.

Statistics

Problem Category

Problem Category	ongoing depression	breakup with partner	job crisis	problems with friends	academic pressure	procras- tination*	alcohol abuse*	issues with parent*	sleep problems*	appearance anxiety*	school bullying*	issues with children*
Number	351	239	280	179	156	13	12	18	28	12	2	10

* denotes the new topics added during the second collection. We hope new data supports the future research in transferring the ability of models from old topics to new ones.

Strategy Category

Strategy Category	Number
Questions	3801(20.7%)
Self-disclosure	1713(9.3%)
Affirmation and Reassurance	2827(15.4%)
Providing Suggestions	2954(16.1%)
Other	3661(18.3%) / 3341(18.2%)
Reflection of feelings	1436(7.8%)
Information	1215(6.6%)
Restatement or Paraphrasing	1089(5.9%)

Model Implementation

We provide two versions of model implementation:

codes is the version that we used in the original experiments
codes_zcj is the version reproduced by @chujiezheng