A Review of Empathetic Conversational Systems

With the rapid development of natural language processing (NLP) technology, there has been increasing research on dialogue systems, as traditional dialogue systems have exhibited a series of flaws. As an important branch of dialogue systems, empathetic conversational systems have gained widespread attention from researchers. Research has shown that incorporating emotions and cognitive reasoning into dialogue systems can achieve superior results. In this paper, we introduce empathetic conversational systems from five aspects. Firstly, we discuss the concepts, definition, and development of empathetic conversational systems, and list several common datasets and standards. Additionally, based on an innovative classification of the main structure of empathetic dialogue system models, we summarize the current major methods and model structures. Finally, we discuss the shortcomings of previous work and future directions for empathetic conversational systems.