Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained emotion understanding; (2) They focus on the seeker's own mental state rather than the emotional dynamics during interaction between speakers. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework CauESC, which firstly recognizes the emotion causes of the distress, as well as the emotion effects triggered by the causes, and then understands each strategy of verbal grooming independently and integrates them skillfully. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show the benefits of emotion understanding from cause to effect and independent-integrated strategy modeling.

翻译：情感支持对话旨在通过支持性回应减轻寻求者的情绪困扰。现有方法存在两个局限：（1）忽略困扰的情绪成因——这一信息对细粒度情绪理解至关重要；（2）过度关注寻求者自身的心理状态，而非对话双方互动中的情绪动态。针对上述问题，我们提出新型框架CauESC，该框架首先识别困扰的情绪成因及其引发的情绪效应，进而独立理解言语抚慰的每种策略，并巧妙整合这些策略。在基准数据集上的实验结果验证了本方法的有效性，揭示了从原因到结果的因果情绪理解范式以及独立-整合策略建模的优越性。