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

Allison Lahnala, Charles Welch, David Jurgens, Lucie Flek


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.157
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2139–2158
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.157
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.157
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Allison Lahnala, Charles Welch, David Jurgens, and Lucie Flek. 2022. A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 2139–2158, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing (Lahnala et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.157.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.157.mp4