Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conversations with Multifaceted AI Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Jiashuo, Xu, Chunpu, Leong, Chak Tou, Li, Wenjie, Li, Jing
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wang, Jiashuo
Xu, Chunpu
Leong, Chak Tou
Li, Wenjie
Li, Jing
author_facet Wang, Jiashuo
Xu, Chunpu
Leong, Chak Tou
Li, Wenjie
Li, Jing
contents An emotional support conversation system aims to alleviate users' emotional distress and assist them in addressing their challenges. To generate supportive responses, it is critical to consider multiple factors such as empathy, support strategies, and response coherence, as established in prior methods. Nonetheless, previous models occasionally generate unhelpful responses, which intend to provide support but display counterproductive effects. According to psychology and communication theories, poor performance in just one contributing factor might cause a response to be unhelpful. From the model training perspective, since these models have not been exposed to unhelpful responses during their training phase, they are unable to distinguish if the tokens they generate might result in unhelpful responses during inference. To address this issue, we introduce a novel model-agnostic framework named mitigating unhelpfulness with multifaceted AI feedback for emotional support (Muffin). Specifically, Muffin employs a multifaceted AI feedback module to assess the helpfulness of responses generated by a specific model with consideration of multiple factors. Using contrastive learning, it then reduces the likelihood of the model generating unhelpful responses compared to the helpful ones. Experimental results demonstrate that Muffin effectively mitigates the generation of unhelpful responses while slightly increasing response fluency and relevance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_05928
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conversations with Multifaceted AI Feedback
Wang, Jiashuo
Xu, Chunpu
Leong, Chak Tou
Li, Wenjie
Li, Jing
Computation and Language
An emotional support conversation system aims to alleviate users' emotional distress and assist them in addressing their challenges. To generate supportive responses, it is critical to consider multiple factors such as empathy, support strategies, and response coherence, as established in prior methods. Nonetheless, previous models occasionally generate unhelpful responses, which intend to provide support but display counterproductive effects. According to psychology and communication theories, poor performance in just one contributing factor might cause a response to be unhelpful. From the model training perspective, since these models have not been exposed to unhelpful responses during their training phase, they are unable to distinguish if the tokens they generate might result in unhelpful responses during inference. To address this issue, we introduce a novel model-agnostic framework named mitigating unhelpfulness with multifaceted AI feedback for emotional support (Muffin). Specifically, Muffin employs a multifaceted AI feedback module to assess the helpfulness of responses generated by a specific model with consideration of multiple factors. Using contrastive learning, it then reduces the likelihood of the model generating unhelpful responses compared to the helpful ones. Experimental results demonstrate that Muffin effectively mitigates the generation of unhelpful responses while slightly increasing response fluency and relevance.
title Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conversations with Multifaceted AI Feedback
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05928