mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories

arXiv 1808.10399 ↗First posted 30 Aug 2018cs.CLcited by 52

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Abstract (arXiv)

Computational detection and understanding of empathy is an important factor in advancing human-computer interaction. Yet to date, text-based empathy prediction has the following major limitations: It underestimates the psychological complexity of the phenomenon, adheres to a weak notion of ground truth where empathic states are ascribed by third parties, and lacks a shared corpus. In contrast, this contribution presents the first publicly available gold standard for empathy prediction. It is constructed using a novel annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the writer of a statement using multi-item scales. This is also the first computational work distinguishing between multiple forms of empathy, empathic concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology. Finally, we present experimental results for three different predictive models, of which a CNN performs the best.

Key facts. Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 9; 2022: 6; 2023: 10; 2024: 13; 2025: 10; 2026: 4.

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  1. 2023Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?cited by 245
  2. 2024CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counselingcited by 88
  3. 2021Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 75
  4. 2023Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmarkcited by 62
  5. 2023The Parrot Dilemma: Human-Labeled vs. LLM-augmented Data in Classification Taskscited by 35
  6. 2023Chain of Empathy: Enhancing Empathetic Response of Large Language Models Based on Psychotherapy Modelscited by 24
  7. 2021Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversationscited by 20
  8. 2022Empathic Conversations: A Multi-level Dataset of Contextualized Conversationscited by 20
  9. 2021EmpathBERT: A BERT-based Framework for Demographic-aware Empathy Predictioncited by 17
  10. 2024HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMscited by 16
  11. 2023MEDIC: A Multimodal Empathy Dataset in Counselingcited by 12
  12. 2024SoMeLVLM: A Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processingcited by 11
38 more
  1. 2024AI on My Shoulder: Supporting Emotional Labor in Front-Office Roles with an LLM-based Empathetic Coworkercited by 11
  2. 2021Style Control for Schema-Guided Natural Language Generationcited by 10
  3. 2022Can Demographic Factors Improve Text Classification? Revisiting Demographic Adaptation in the Age of Transformerscited by 10
  4. 2022EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intentscited by 9
  5. 2025Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners: Modular Reasoning with Brain-Like Specializationcited by 9
  6. 2021Supporting Cognitive and Emotional Empathic Writing of Studentscited by 8
  7. 2024Computational Politeness in Natural Language Processing: A Surveycited by 8
  8. 2021PVG at WASSA 2021: A Multi-Input, Multi-Task, Transformer-Based Architecture for Empathy and Distress Predictioncited by 7
  9. 2024SOCIALITE-LLAMA: An Instruction-Tuned Model for Social Scientific Taskscited by 7
  10. 2021WASSA@IITK at WASSA 2021: Multi-task Learning and Transformer Finetuning for Emotion Classification and Empathy Predictioncited by 6
  11. 2025Linguistic Comparison of AI- and Human-Written Responses to Online Mental Health Queriescited by 6
  12. 2021Team Phoenix at WASSA 2021: Emotion Analysis on News Stories with Pre-Trained Language Modelscited by 5
  13. 2023Empathy Detection from Text, Audiovisual, Audio or Physiological Signals: A Systematic Review of Task Formulations and Machine Learning Methodscited by 5
  14. 2024PsyDI: Towards a Personalized and Progressively In-depth Chatbot for Psychological Measurementscited by 5
  15. 2025Interpersonal Theory of Suicide as a Lens to Examine Suicidal Ideation in Online Spacescited by 5
  16. 2022A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processingcited by 4
  17. 2024Impact of Decoding Methods on Human Alignment of Conversational LLMscited by 4
  18. 2021Constructing Emotion Consensus and Utilizing Unpaired Data for Empathetic Dialogue Generationcited by 3
  19. 2022Prompt-based System for Personality and Interpersonal Reactivity Predictioncited by 3
  20. 2024EmPO: Emotion Grounding for Empathetic Response Generation through Preference Optimizationcited by 3
  21. 2023Investigating Stylistic Profiles for the Task of Empathy Classification in Medical Narrative Essayscited by 2
  22. 2023Automatically Classifying Emotions based on Text: A Comparative Exploration of Different Datasetscited by 2
  23. 2024CPsyExam: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Psychology using Examinationscited by 2
  24. 2025Does AI Coaching Prepare us for Workplace Negotiations?cited by 2
  25. 2026Not My Truce: Personality Differences in AI-Mediated Workplace Negotiationcited by 2
  26. 2026Uncertainty Decomposition via Cyclical SG-MCMC and Soft-label Learning for Subjective NLPcited by 2
  27. 2026LLUMI: Improving LLM Writing Assistance for Mental Health Support with Online Community Feedbackcited by 2
  28. 2023Data Augmentation for Emotion Detection in Small Imbalanced Text Datacited by 1
  29. 2024Secret Keepers: The Impact of LLMs on Linguistic Markers of Personal Traitscited by 1
  30. 2024Turn-Level Empathy Prediction Using Psychological Indicatorscited by 1
  31. 2025Labels Generated by Large Language Models Help Measure People's Empathy in Vitrocited by 1
  32. 2025Capturing Human Cognitive Styles with Language: Towards an Experimental Evaluation Paradigmcited by 1
  33. 2025UPLME: Uncertainty-Aware Probabilistic Language Modelling for Robust Empathy Regressioncited by 1
  34. 2022On the Limitations of Sociodemographic Adaptation with Transformerscited by 0
  35. 2023EMP-EVAL: A Framework for Measuring Empathy in Open Domain Dialoguescited by 0
  36. 2024Towards More Accurate Prediction of Human Empathy and Emotion in Text and Multi-turn Conversations by Combining Advanced NLP, Transformers-based Networks, and Linguistic Methodologiescited by 0
  37. 2025Privacy-Preserving Empathy Detection in Video Interactionscited by 0
  38. 2025Benchmarking Sociolinguistic Diversity in Swahili NLP: A Taxonomy-Guided Approachcited by 0

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