{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/modeling-empathetic-alignment-in-conversation","title":"Modeling Empathetic Alignment in Conversation","arxiv_id":"2405.00948","date":"2024-05-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiamin Yang","David Jurgens"],"abstract":"Empathy requires perspective-taking: empathetic responses require a person to reason about what another has experienced and communicate that understanding in language. However, most NLP approaches to empathy do not explicitly model this alignment process. Here, we introduce a new approach to recognizing alignment in empathetic speech, grounded in Appraisal Theory. We introduce a new dataset of over 9.2K span-level annotations of different types of appraisals of a person's experience and over 3K empathetic alignments between a speaker's and observer's speech. Through computational experiments, we show that these appraisals and alignments can be accurately recognized. In experiments in over 9.2M Reddit conversations, we find that appraisals capture meaningful groupings of behavior but that most responses have minimal alignment. However, we find that mental health professionals engage with substantially more empathetic alignment.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00948v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.00948v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"modeling-empathetic-alignment-in-conversation","repo_url":"https://github.com/jessicayjm/modeling_empathy_alignment","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"modeling-empathetic-alignment-in-conversation","repo_url":"https://github.com/jessicayjm/span_alignment_annotation_tool","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2405.00948","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}