Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories (D18-1)

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Challenge: a recent work on empathy prediction has underestimated the complexity of the phenomenon and lacks a shared corpus. authors present a novel annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the writer of a statement using multi-item scales.
Approach: They propose a method which captures empathy assessments by the writer of a statement using multi-item scales.
Outcome: The proposed method distinguishes between multiple forms of empathy, empathic concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology.

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Challenge: Empathy measurement has predominantly occurred in synchronous, face-to-face settings, and may not translate to asynchronous, text-based contexts.
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EMPATH: An Ensemble Method for Automatic Fine-Grained Turn-Level Dialogue Empathy Evaluation with a Novel Emotional Distance Metric (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Empathy evaluation metrics are lacking in the competitions, and classical dialogue evaluation metrics require further investigation.
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Towards Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models: A New Benchmark and Dataset (P19-1)

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Challenge: EmpatheticDialogues dataset provides a benchmark for empathetic dialogue generation . human evaluators perceive dialogue models as more epathetic .
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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.
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Learning Word Ratings for Empathy and Distress from Document-Level User Responses (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Emotion analysis of text is increasing in popularity in NLP, however, manually creating lexica for psychological constructs such as empathy has proven difficult.
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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.
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EmpathicStories++: A Multimodal Dataset for Empathy Towards Personal Experiences (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for empathy modeling are limited in the ways they are not captured in the wild.
Approach: They propose a multimodal dataset for empathy during personal experience sharing that contains 53 hours of video, audio, and text data of 41 participants.
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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.
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Supporting Cognitive and Emotional Empathic Writing of Students (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Empathy skills are an elementary skill in society for daily interaction and professional communication and are therefore elementary for educational curricula.
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Empathy Applicability Modeling for General Health Queries (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing NLP frameworks focus on reactively labeling empathy in doctors’ responses but offer limited support for anticipatory modeling of empathy needs, especially in general health queries.
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