ConText at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: History-Dependent Embedding Utterance Representations for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations

Patrícia Pereira, Helena Moniz, Joao Paulo Carvalho


Abstract
Empathy and emotion prediction are key components in the development of effective and empathetic agents, amongst several other applications. The WASSA shared task on empathy empathy and emotion prediction in interactions presents an opportunity to benchmark approaches to these tasks.Appropriately selecting and representing the historical context is crucial in the modelling of empathy and emotion in conversations. In our submissions, we model empathy, emotion polarity and emotion intensity of each utterance in a conversation by feeding the utterance to be classified together with its conversational context, i.e., a certain number of previous conversational turns, as input to an encoder Pre-trained Language Model (PLM), to which we append a regression head for prediction. We also model perceived counterparty empathy of each interlocutor by feeding all utterances from the conversation and a token identifying the interlocutor for which we are predicting the empathy. Our system officially ranked 1st at the CONV-turn track and 2nd at the CONV-dialog track.
Anthology ID:
2024.wassa-1.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Orphée De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, João Sedoc, Shabnam Tafreshi
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
448–453
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wassa-1.42
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.wassa-1.42
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrícia Pereira, Helena Moniz, and Joao Paulo Carvalho. 2024. ConText at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: History-Dependent Embedding Utterance Representations for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 448–453, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConText at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: History-Dependent Embedding Utterance Representations for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations (Pereira et al., WASSA-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wassa-1.42.pdf