Predicting Empathic Accuracy from User-Designer Interviews

Steven Nguyen Fataliyev, Daniel Beck, Katja Holtta-Otto


Abstract
Measuring empathy as a natural language processing task has often been limited to a subjective measure of how well individuals respond to each other in emotive situations. Cognitive empathy, or an individual’s ability to accurately assess another individual’s thoughts, remains a more novel task. In this paper, we explore natural language processing techniques to measure cognitive empathy using paired sentence data from design interviews. Our findings show that an unsupervised approach based on similarity of vectors from a Large Language Model is surprisingly promising, while adding supervision does not necessarily improve the performance. An analysis of the results highlights potential reasons for this behaviour and gives directions for future work in this space.
Anthology ID:
2023.alta-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association
Month:
November
Year:
2023
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Kennington Casey, Vandyke David, Dethlefs Nina, Inoue Koji, Ekstedt Erik, Ultes Stefan
Venue:
ALTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
125–129
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alta-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Steven Nguyen Fataliyev, Daniel Beck, and Katja Holtta-Otto. 2023. Predicting Empathic Accuracy from User-Designer Interviews. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association, pages 125–129, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Empathic Accuracy from User-Designer Interviews (Fataliyev et al., ALTA 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alta-1.14.pdf