About Me
Hey! I'm Sahand (aka Sam or 山姆), currently a second-year PhD student at Tsinghua University's Conversational AI lab (THU CoAI), advised by Prof. Minlie Huang. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's degree at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in 2020 and my Master's degree at Tsinghua University in 2022, majoring in Computer Science and Technology.
My research mainly revolves around Emotional Intelligence in Natural Language Processing, specifically in the domain of open-domain conversational agents or chatbots. This line of work aims to enable these agents to better engage with users through modeling human behavior by understanding user's emotions, demonstrating empathy, and providing appropriate support and companionship. More recently, I have shifted my focus to more task-specific cases of this research direction to explore the use of agents in mental health support. With the worldwide prevalence of mental health issues and mental distress becoming a more critical issue in our society, such models can help facilitate affordable and available support for those in need.
In summary,
- 💻 I’m currently work on emotionally intelligent dialogue systems and learning a lot!
- ❤️ I’m interested in using dialogue systems for mental health and emotional support.
- 🤝 I’m open to collaborate on interesting projects! Reach me through Email.
Publications
- Sahand Sabour, Wen Zhang, Xiyao Xiao, Yuwei Zhang, Yinhe Zheng, Jiaxin Wen, Jialu Zhao, and Minlie Huang. Chatbots for Mental Health Support: Exploring the Impact of Emohaa on Reducing Mental Distress in China. Frontiers in Digital Health (5), 2023.
- Jiale Cheng*, Sahand Sabour*, Hao Sun, Zhuang Chen, and Minlie Huang. PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).
- Chujie Zheng, Sahand Sabour, Jiaxin Wang, and Minlie Huang. AugESC: A Large-scale Machine-Augmented Dataset for Emotional Support Conversation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).
- Siyang Liu*, Sahand Sabour*, Yinhe Zheng, Pei Ke, Xiaoyan Zhu, and Minlie Huang. Rethinking and Refining the Distinct Metric. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022).
- Sahand Sabour, Chujie Zheng, and Minlie Huang. CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021).
- Siyang Liu, Chujie Zheng, Orianna Demasi, Sahand Sabour, Yu Li, Zhou Yu, Yong Jiang, and Minlie Huang. Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022).
* indicates equal contribution.