ESCA: An Emotional Support Conversation Agent for Enhancing Reasonable Strategy Planning and Effective Expression

Abstract

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate individuals’ negative emotions through multi-turn dialogues, where effective strategy planning and response generation are essential. However, existing methods often suffer from limitations in both planning reasonable support strategies and effectively expressing them in responses. To the end, we propose a novel LLM-based Emotional Support Conversation Agent (ESCA) with a plug-in strategy planner and a strategy-aligned prompt generator. The strategy planner cooperates with four aspects of the seeker’s state, including emotion intensity, trust degree, dialogue behavior, and stage of change, to enhance the rationality and effectiveness of the strategy prediction. To ensure that predicted strategies are better conveyed, the prompt generator integrates strategy-aligned instructions, knowledge, and context to generate the soft prompt for guiding the LLM to generate supportive responses. In addition to supervised fine-tuning, the prompt generator is further optimized by reinforcement learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ESCA significantly improves both response quality and the success rate of achieving the ESC task goal.