Related papers: Modeling Empathetic Alignment in Conversation

Supportive conversation depends on skills that go beyond language fluency, including reading emotions, adjusting tone, and navigating moments of resistance, frustration, or distress. Despite rapid progress in language models, we still lack…

Counseling typically takes the form of spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is considered to be an essential quality factor of counseling outcome. This paper proposes a…

The most prominent tasks in emotion analysis are to assign emotions to texts and to understand how emotions manifest in language. An observation for NLP is that emotions can be communicated implicitly by referring to events, appealing to an…

Empathetic Conversational Systems (ECS) are built to respond empathetically to the user's emotions and sentiments, regardless of the application domain. Current ECS studies evaluation approaches are restricted to offline evaluation…

Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support. If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global…

A central challenge in affective computing is determining appropriate empathy levels for different interaction contexts. Prior work has characterized two poles: task-focused interactions, where empathy demand is near zero, and emotional…

Empathy indicates an individual's ability to understand others. Over the past few years, empathy has drawn attention from various disciplines, including but not limited to Affective Computing, Cognitive Science, and Psychology. Detecting…

Empathic accuracy (EA) is the ability to accurately understand another person\textquotesingle s thoughts and feelings, which is crucial for social and psychological interactions. Traditionally, EA is assessed by comparing a…

Evaluating persona-aligned empathy in LLM-based dialogue agents remains challenging. User states are latent, feedback is sparse and difficult to verify in situ, and seemingly supportive turns can still accumulate into trajectories that…

This paper argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) should incorporate explicit mechanisms for human empathy. As LLMs become increasingly deployed in high-stakes human-centered settings, their success depends not only on correctness or…

We explore the representational space of emotions by combining methods from different academic fields. Cognitive science has proposed appraisal theory as a view on human emotion with previous research showing how human-rated abstract event…

We introduce the concept of "empathic grounding" in conversational agents as an extension of Clark's conceptualization of grounding in conversation in which the grounding criterion includes listener empathy for the speaker's affective…

Previous research on empathetic dialogue systems has mostly focused on generating responses given certain emotions. However, being empathetic not only requires the ability of generating emotional responses, but more importantly, requires…

Empathy plays a pivotal role in fostering prosocial behavior, often triggered by the sharing of personal experiences through narratives. However, modeling empathy using NLP approaches remains challenging due to its deep interconnection with…

Empathy is increasingly recognized as a key factor in human-AI communication, yet conventional approaches to "digital empathy" often focus on simulating internal, human-like emotional states while overlooking the inherently subjective,…

Social interactions promote well-being, yet barriers like geographic distance, time limitations, and mental health conditions can limit face-to-face interactions. Emotionally responsive AI systems, such as chatbots, offer new opportunities…

LLMs are increasingly being integrated into clinical workflows, yet they often lack clinical empathy, an essential aspect of effective doctor-patient communication. Existing NLP frameworks focus on reactively labeling empathy in doctors'…

Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In…

Empathy is often understood as the ability to share and understand another individual's state of mind or emotion. With the increasing use of chatbots in various domains, e.g., children seeking help with homework, individuals looking for…

Why do we give the explanations we do? Recent work has suggested that we should think of explanation as a kind of cooperative social interaction, between a why-question-asker and an explainer. Here, we apply this perspective to consider the…