Modeling Empathetic Alignment in Conversation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Jiamin, Jurgens, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yang, Jiamin
Jurgens, David
author_facet Yang, Jiamin
Jurgens, David
contents Empathy requires perspective-taking: empathetic responses require a person to reason about what another has experienced and communicate that understanding in language. However, most NLP approaches to empathy do not explicitly model this alignment process. Here, we introduce a new approach to recognizing alignment in empathetic speech, grounded in Appraisal Theory. We introduce a new dataset of over 9.2K span-level annotations of different types of appraisals of a person's experience and over 3K empathetic alignments between a speaker's and observer's speech. Through computational experiments, we show that these appraisals and alignments can be accurately recognized. In experiments in over 9.2M Reddit conversations, we find that appraisals capture meaningful groupings of behavior but that most responses have minimal alignment. However, we find that mental health professionals engage with substantially more empathetic alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_00948
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling Empathetic Alignment in Conversation
Yang, Jiamin
Jurgens, David
Computation and Language
Empathy requires perspective-taking: empathetic responses require a person to reason about what another has experienced and communicate that understanding in language. However, most NLP approaches to empathy do not explicitly model this alignment process. Here, we introduce a new approach to recognizing alignment in empathetic speech, grounded in Appraisal Theory. We introduce a new dataset of over 9.2K span-level annotations of different types of appraisals of a person's experience and over 3K empathetic alignments between a speaker's and observer's speech. Through computational experiments, we show that these appraisals and alignments can be accurately recognized. In experiments in over 9.2M Reddit conversations, we find that appraisals capture meaningful groupings of behavior but that most responses have minimal alignment. However, we find that mental health professionals engage with substantially more empathetic alignment.
title Modeling Empathetic Alignment in Conversation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00948