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Allison Lahnala

4 accepted papers

2025

The Illusion of Empathy: How AI Chatbots Shape Conversation Perception

AAAI 2025technical

As AI chatbots increasingly incorporate empathy, understanding user-centered perceptions of chatbot empathy and its impact on conversation quality remains essential yet under-explored. This study examines how chatbot identity and perceived empathy influence users' overall conversation experience. An…

2025

The Practical Impacts of Theoretical Constructs on Empathy Modeling

EMNLP 2025

Conceptual operationalizations of empathy in NLP are varied, with some having specific behaviors and properties, while others are more abstract. How these variations relate to one another and capture properties of empathy observable in text remains unclear. To provide insight into this, we analyze t

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing

EMNLP 2022finding

We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2022

Mitigating Toxic Degeneration with Empathetic Data: Exploring the Relationship Between Toxicity and Empathy

NAACL 2022long

Large pre-trained neural language models have supported the effectiveness of many NLP tasks, yet are still prone to generating toxic language hindering the safety of their use. Using empathetic data, we improve over recent work on controllable text generation that aims to reduce the toxicity of gene…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar