Emotions are indispensable in human communication, but are often overlooked in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) modelling, where the task success is the primary focus. While existing works have explored user emotions or similar concepts in some ToD tasks, none has so far included emotion modelling into a fully-fledged ToD system nor conducted interaction with human or simulated users. In this work, we incorporate emotion into the complete ToD processing loop, involving understanding, management, and generation. To this end, we extend the EmoWOZ dataset (Feng et al., 2022) with system affective behaviour labels. Through interactive experimentation involving both simulated and human users, we demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly enhances the user's emotional experience as well as the task success.

翻译：情感在人类交流中不可或缺，但在任务导向对话建模中常被忽视，该领域主要关注任务成功率。尽管现有研究已在某些任务导向对话任务中探索了用户情感或类似概念，但迄今尚未将情感建模纳入完整的任务导向对话系统，也未与真实或模拟用户进行交互。本研究中，我们将情感整合至完整的任务导向对话处理闭环，涵盖理解、管理与生成三个层面。为此，我们为EmoWOZ数据集（Feng等人，2022）扩展了系统情感行为标注。通过涉及模拟用户与真实用户的交互实验，我们证明所提出的框架能显著提升用户情感体验及任务完成效果。