Modeling Multiple Support Strategies within a Single Turn for Emotional Support Conversations
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to assist individuals experiencing distress by generating empathetic and supportive dialogue. While prior work typically assumes that each supporter turn corresponds to a single strategy, real-world supportive communication often involves multiple strategies within a single utterance. In this paper, we revisit the ESC task by formulating it as multi-strategy utterance generation, where each utterance may contain one or more strategy-response pairs. We propose two generation methods: All-in-One, which predicts all strategy-response pairs in a single decoding step, and One-by-One, which iteratively generates strategy-response pairs until completion....
| Authors | Jie Zhu, Huaixia Dou, Junhui Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 April 2026 |
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