Empathy Intent Drives Empathy Detection

Liting Jiang, Di Wu, Bohui Mao, Yanbing Li, Wushour Slamu


Abstract
Empathy plays an important role in the human dialogue. Detecting the empathetic direction expressed by the user is necessary for empathetic dialogue systems because it is highly relevant to understanding the user’s needs. Several studies have shown that empathy intent information improves the ability to response capacity of empathetic dialogue. However, the interaction between empathy detection and empathy intent recognition has not been explored. To this end, we invite 3 experts to manually annotate the healthy empathy detection datasets IEMPATHIZE and TwittEmp with 8 empathy intent labels, and perform joint training for the two tasks. Empirical study has shown that the introduction of empathy intent recognition task can improve the accuracy of empathy detection task, and we analyze possible reasons for this improvement. To make joint training of the two tasks more challenging, we propose a novel framework, Cascaded Label Signal Network, which uses the cascaded interactive attention module and the label signal enhancement module to capture feature exchange information between empathy and empathy intent representations. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms all baselines under both settings on the two datasets.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.386
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6279–6290
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.386
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.386
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liting Jiang, Di Wu, Bohui Mao, Yanbing Li, and Wushour Slamu. 2023. Empathy Intent Drives Empathy Detection. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6279–6290, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Empathy Intent Drives Empathy Detection (Jiang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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