STAR: Strategy-Aware Refinement Module in Multitask Learning for Emotional Support Conversations

Effective emotional support in conversation requires strategic decision making, as it involves complex, context-sensitive reasoning tailored to diverse individual needs.The Emotional Support Conversation framework addresses this by organizing interactions into three distinct phases-exploration, comforting, and action-which guide strategy selection during response generation.While multitask learning has been applied to jointly optimize strategy prediction and response generation, it often suffers from task interference due to conflicting learning objectives.To overcome this, we propose the Strategy-Aware Refinement Module (STAR), which disentangles the decoder's hidden states for each task and selectively fuses them via a dynamic gating mechanism.This design preserves task-specific representations while allowing controlled information exchange between tasks, thus reducing interference.Experimental results demonstrate that STAR effectively reduces task interference and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both strategy prediction and supportive response generation.