A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing
Allison Lahnala, Charles Welch, David Jurgens, Lucie Flek
Abstract
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 subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lahnala-etal-2022-critical,
title = "A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing",
author = "Lahnala, Allison and
Welch, Charles and
Jurgens, David and
Flek, Lucie",
editor = "Goldberg, Yoav and
Kozareva, Zornitsa and
Zhang, Yue",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022",
month = dec,
year = "2022",
address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.157/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.157",
pages = "2139--2158"
}