# Towards an Empathetic Open-domain Conversational Agent

- **Authors**: H. Rashkin, E. M. Smith, M. Li, Y. Boureau
- **Year**: 2019
- **Summary**: This paper introduces the EMPATHETICDIALOGUES dataset, a large-scale dataset of conversations grounded in specific emotional situations. The authors use this dataset to train Transformer-based models to generate empathetic responses. This work shifted the focus from simple emotion classification to generating contextually appropriate and empathetic dialogue.
- **Link**: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06251