ACC-ERG:Coordinating Affective and Cognitive Support for Empathetic Response Generation

Empathetic response generation methods model affective and cognitive information to better understand users' states. However, generated responses may mismatch the context by overlooking emotional needs or offering generic comfort when advice is required. To address this issue, we propose ACC-ERG, an Affective–Cognitive Coordination framework that adjusts the relative emphasis on affective and cognitive support according to the dialogue context. First, we build affective and cognitive experts to learn specialized support representations. Second, we design a Proportion Gate to predict a weight that characterizes the relative emphasis on affective versus cognitive support. Finally, we fuse these representations to generate an empathetic response according to the weight. Moreover, we construct ACC-ERG dataset with weight annotations and responses aligned with weights. Experiments on EmpatheticDialogues and ACC-ERG datasets show our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that varying weight correspondingly shifts the relative emphasis of affective and cognitive support in generated responses.