Abstract
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.
Abstract (translated)
共情需要换位思考：具有同情心的反应需要一个人从另一个人的经历中进行推理，并用语言表达这种理解。然而，大多数自然语言处理方法并没有明确建模这种对齐过程。在这里，我们引入了一种基于评估理论的新方法来识别共情言语中的对齐，这个新数据集包括超过9.2K个跨度级别的不同类型对一个人经历的评估，以及超过3K个说话者和观察者之间的共情对齐。通过计算实验，我们证明了这些评估和对应关系可以被准确识别。在超过9.2M个Reddit对话的实验中，我们发现评估捕捉了行为的有意义的群体，但大多数响应都没有很好的对齐性。然而，我们发现心理健康专业人士与共情对齐的参与度相当大。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00948
