Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Empathetic Dialogue Responses

Zhichao Xu, Jiepu Jiang


Abstract
Empathy is critical for effective and satisfactory conversational communication. Prior efforts to measure conversational empathy mostly focus on expressed communicative intents—that is, the way empathy is expressed. Yet, these works ignore the fact that conversation is also a collaboration involving both speakers and listeners. In contrast, we propose a multi-dimensional empathy evaluation framework to measure both expressed intents from the speaker’s perspective and perceived empathy from the listener’s perspective. We apply our analytical framework to examine internal customer-service dialogues. We find the two dimensions (expressed intent types and perceived empathy) are interconnected, while perceived empathy has high correlations with dialogue satisfaction levels.To reduce the annotation cost, we explore different options to automatically measure conversational empathy: prompting LLMs and training language model-based classifiers. Our experiments show that prompting methods with even popular models like GPT-4 and Flan family models perform relatively poorly on both public and our internal datasets. In contrast, instruction-finetuned classifiers based on FlanT5 family models outperform prior works and competitive baselines. We conduct a detailed ablation study to give more insights into instruction finetuning method’s strong performance.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.113
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2066–2087
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.113
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhichao Xu and Jiepu Jiang. 2024. Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Empathetic Dialogue Responses. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 2066–2087, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Empathetic Dialogue Responses (Xu & Jiang, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.113.pdf