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

arXiv:2604.07100v2 Announce Type: replace-cross 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-stag