FiSMiness: A Finite State Machine Based Paradigm for Emotional Support Conversations

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11837v1
• Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:52:06 GMT
• Title: FiSMiness: A Finite State Machine Based Paradigm for Emotional Support Conversations
• Authors: Yue Zhao, Qingqing Gu, Xiaoyu Wang, Teng Chen, Zhonglin Jiang, Yong Chen, Luo Ji,
• Abstract summary: Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate the emotional distress of individuals through effective conversations.<n>We leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on large language models and propose a framework called FiSMiness.<n>Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy and the final response upon each conversational turn.
• Score: 11.718316719735832
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate the emotional distress of individuals through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have obtained remarkable progress on ESC, most of these studies might not define the diagram from the state model perspective, therefore providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called FiSMiness. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy and the final response upon each conversational turn. Substantial experiments on ESC datasets suggest that FiSMiness outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-refine, chain of thought, finetuning, and external-assisted methods, even those with many more parameters.

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