Overview of the NLPCC 2017 Shared Task: Emotion Generation Challenge

It has been a long-term goal for AI to perceive and express emotions. Inspired by Emotional Chatting Machine [1], we propose a challenge task to investigate how well a chatting machine can express emotion by generating a textual response to an input post. The task is defined as follows: given a post and a pre-specified emotion class of the generated response, the task is to generate a response that is appropriate in both topic and emotion. This challenge has attracted more 40 teams registered, and finally there are 10 teams who submitted results. In this overview paper, we will report the details of this challenge, including task definition, data preparation, annotation schema, submission statistics, and evaluation results.