Sibyl: Sensible Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Visionary Commonsense Knowledge

Recently, there has been a heightened interest in building chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to emulate human-like qualities in dialogues, including expressing empathy and offering emotional support. Despite having access to commonsense knowledge to better understand the psychological aspects and causality of dialogue context, even these powerful LLMs struggle to achieve the goals of empathy and emotional support. As current approaches do not adequately anticipate dialogue future, they may mislead language models to ignore complex dialogue goals of empathy and emotional support, resulting in unsupportive responses lacking empathy. To address this issue, we present an innovative framework named Sensible Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Visionary Commonsense Knowledge (Sibyl). Designed to concentrate on the imminent dialogue future, this paradigm directs LLMs toward the implicit requirements of the conversation, aiming to provide more sensible responses. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating our paradigm for acquiring commonsense knowledge into LLMs comprehensively enhances the quality of their responses.