Can Machines Resonate with Humans? Evaluating the Emotional and Empathic Comprehension of LMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empathy plays a pivotal role in fostering prosocial behavior, often triggered by the sharing of personal experiences through narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contrastive learning with masked LMs and supervised fine-tuning with large language models to improve empathy understanding in NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that there is low agreement among annotators and that cultural differences are a factor in their interpretation of empathy. |
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| Challenge: | Empathy recognition and empathetic response generation tasks are well-established research directions, but there is little clarity on what empathy is and how it is being operationalized. |
| Approach: | They argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. |
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Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvements (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empathetic dialogue is an essential part of building harmonious social relationships and contributes to the development of a helpful AI. |
| Approach: | They propose three methods to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) they propose semantically similar in-context learning, two-stage interactive generation and combination with the knowledge base. |
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Tailored Emotional LLM-Supporter: Enhancing Cultural Sensitivity (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing potential in offering emotional support, but their ability to deliver culturally sensitive support remains underexplored due to a lack of resources. |
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Are LLMs Empathetic to All? Investigating the Influence of Multi-Demographic Personas on a Model’s Empathy (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models’ ability to converse naturally is empowered by their ability to empathetically understand and respond to their users. |
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HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empathy is a foundational psychological process that drives many prosocial functions. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory-based taxonomy that delineates elements of narrative style that can lead to empathy with the narrator of a story. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy delineates elements of narrative style that can lead to empathy with the narrator of a story. |
LLM-GEm: Large Language Model-Guided Prediction of People’s Empathy Levels towards Newspaper Article (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Empathy is a key component of human-to-human interactions, and is often overlooked due to the inherent noise in crowdsourced annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-guided empathy prediction system that rectifies annotation errors based on defined annotation selection threshold and makes annotations reliable for conventional empathy prediction models. |
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SoulChat: Improving LLMs’ Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are used in psychological counseling to provide universal advice. |
| Approach: | They constructed a multi-turn empathetic conversation dataset with 2 million samples . they found that the model's empathy ability is enhanced when finetuning . |
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Large Human Language Models: A Need and the Challenges (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing recognition of the importance of modeling human and social factors into human-centered NLP models . authors advocate for three positions toward creating large human language models based on psychological and behavioral sciences . |
| Approach: | et al. advocate for three positions toward creating large human language models . they argue that LM training should include the human context and recognize that people are more than their group . |
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Whose Emotions and Moral Sentiments do Language Models Reflect? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on positional alignment, which measures how closely the models mimic the opinions and stances of different social groups. |
| Approach: | They define the problem of affective alignment, which measures how LMs’ emotional and moral tone represents those of different groups. |
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Modeling Empathic Similarity in Personal Narratives (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | EmpathicStories is a dataset of 1,500 personal stories annotated with empathic similarity features and 2,000 pairs of stories annnotated by empathism. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to identify similarity in personal stories based on empathic resonance . they use a dataset of 1,500 personal stories annotated with empathism features . |
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