Distilling Knowledge for Empathy Detection

Mahshid Hosseini, Cornelia Caragea


Abstract
Empathy is the link between self and others. Detecting and understanding empathy is a key element for improving human-machine interaction. However, annotating data for detecting empathy at a large scale is a challenging task. This paper employs multi-task training with knowledge distillation to incorporate knowledge from available resources (emotion and sentiment) to detect empathy from the natural language in different domains. This approach yields better results on an existing news-related empathy dataset compared to strong baselines. In addition, we build a new dataset for empathy prediction with fine-grained empathy direction, seeking or providing empathy, from Twitter. We release our dataset for research purposes.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.314
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3713–3724
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.314
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.314
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mahshid Hosseini and Cornelia Caragea. 2021. Distilling Knowledge for Empathy Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3713–3724, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distilling Knowledge for Empathy Detection (Hosseini & Caragea, Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.314.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.314.mp4
Code
 mahhos/kdempathy
Data
DailyDialogGoEmotionsISEARSSTSST-2