A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lahnala, Allison, Welch, Charles, Jurgens, David, Flek, Lucie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Lahnala, Allison
Welch, Charles
Jurgens, David
Flek, Lucie
author_facet Lahnala, Allison
Welch, Charles
Jurgens, David
Flek, Lucie
contents We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_16604
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing
Lahnala, Allison
Welch, Charles
Jurgens, David
Flek, Lucie
Computation and Language
We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.
title A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16604