LLM-GEm: Large Language Model-Guided Prediction of People’s Empathy Levels towards Newspaper Article

Md Rakibul Hasan, Md Zakir Hossain, Tom Gedeon, Shafin Rahman


Abstract
Empathy – encompassing the understanding and supporting others’ emotions and perspectives – strengthens various social interactions, including written communication in healthcare, education and journalism. Detecting empathy using AI models by relying on self-assessed ground truth through crowdsourcing is challenging due to the inherent noise in such annotations. To this end, we propose a novel system, named Large Language Model-Guided Empathy _(LLM-GEm)_ prediction system. It rectifies annotation errors based on our defined annotation selection threshold and makes the annotations reliable for conventional empathy prediction models, e.g., BERT-based pre-trained language models (PLMs). Previously, demographic information was often integrated numerically into empathy detection models. In contrast, our _LLM-GEm_ leverages GPT-3.5 LLM to convert numerical data into semantically meaningful textual sequences, enabling seamless integration into PLMs. We experiment with three _NewsEmpathy_ datasets involving people’s empathy levels towards newspaper articles and achieve state-of-the-art test performance using a RoBERTa-based PLM. Code and evaluations are publicly available at [https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLM-GEm](https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLM-GEm).
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.147
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2215–2231
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.147
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md Rakibul Hasan, Md Zakir Hossain, Tom Gedeon, and Shafin Rahman. 2024. LLM-GEm: Large Language Model-Guided Prediction of People’s Empathy Levels towards Newspaper Article. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 2215–2231, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-GEm: Large Language Model-Guided Prediction of People’s Empathy Levels towards Newspaper Article (Hasan et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.147.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-eacl.147.software.zip
Note:
 2024.findings-eacl.147.note.zip