  As a critical step to achieve human-like chatbots, empathetic response
generation has attained increasing interests. Previous attempts are incomplete
and not sufficient enough to elicit empathy because they only focus on the
initial aspect of empathy to automatically mimic the feelings and thoughts of
the user via other-awareness. However, they ignore to maintain and take the own
views of the system into account, which is a crucial process to achieve the
empathy called self-other awareness. To this end, we propose to generate
Empathetic response with explicit Self-Other Awareness (EmpSOA). Specifically,
three stages, self-other differentiation, self-other modulation and self-other
generation, are devised to clearly maintain, regulate and inject the self-other
aware information into the process of empathetic response generation. Both
automatic and human evaluations on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the
superiority of EmpSOA to generate more empathetic responses.
