[2604.07100] STRIDE-ED: A Strategy-Grounded Stepwise Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Dialogue Systems

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2604.07100 (cs) [Submitted on 8 Apr 2026] Title:STRIDE-ED: A Strategy-Grounded Stepwise Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Dialogue Systems Authors:Hongru Ji, Yuyin Fan, Meng Zhao, Xianghua Li, Lianwei Wu, Chao Gao View a PDF of the paper titled STRIDE-ED: A Strategy-Grounded Stepwise Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Dialogue Systems, by Hongru Ji and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Empathetic dialogue requires not only recognizing a user's emotional state but also making strategy-aware, context-sensitive decisions throughout response generation. However, the lack of a comprehensive empathy strategy framework, explicit task-aligned multi-stage reasoning, and high-quality strategy-aware data fundamentally limits existing approaches, preventing them from effectively modeling empathetic dialogue as a complex, multi-stage cognitive and decision-making process. To address these challenges, we propose STRIDE-ED, a STRategy-grounded, Interpretable, and DEep reasoning framework that models Empathetic Dialogue through structured, strategy-conditioned reasoning. To support effective learning, we develop a strategy-aware data refinement pipeline integrating LLM-based annotation, multi-model consistency-weighted evaluation, and dynamic sampling to construct high-quality training data aligned with empathetic strategies. Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm that combines supervised fine-tuning with ...