Modeling Empathetic Alignment in Conversation

arXiv:2405.00948v1 Announce Type: new
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 …

abstract alignment arxiv conversation cs.cl empathy however language modeling nlp person perspective process reason responses speech theory type understanding