Empathify at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: Contextualizing Empathy with a BERT-Based Context-Aware Approach for Empathy Detection

Arda Numanoğlu, Süleyman Ateş, Nihan Cicekli, Dilek Küçük

Abstract
Empathy detection from textual data is a complex task that requires an understanding of both the content and context of the text. This study presents a BERT-based context-aware approach to enhance empathy detection in conversations and essays. We participated in the WASSA 2024 Shared Task, focusing on two tracks: empathy and emotion prediction in conversations (CONV-turn) and empathy and distress prediction in essays (EMP). Our approach leverages contextual information by incorporating related articles and emotional characteristics as additional inputs, using BERT-based Siamese (parallel) architecture. Our experiments demonstrated that using article summaries as context significantly improves performance, with the parallel BERT approach outperforming the traditional method of concatenating inputs with the ‘[SEP]‘ token. These findings highlight the importance of context-awareness in empathy detection and pave the way for future improvements in the sensitivity and accuracy of such systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.wassa-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Orphée De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, João Sedoc, Shabnam Tafreshi
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
393–398
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wassa-1.33
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arda Numanoğlu, Süleyman Ateş, Nihan Cicekli, and Dilek Küçük. 2024. Empathify at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: Contextualizing Empathy with a BERT-Based Context-Aware Approach for Empathy Detection. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 393–398, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Empathify at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: Contextualizing Empathy with a BERT-Based Context-Aware Approach for Empathy Detection (Numanoğlu et al., WASSA-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.wassa-1.33.pdf
PDF Search