# Evaluating Empathy in Artificial Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05341/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Exploring ChatGPT's Empathic Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03527/) (2023)
- [Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Empathetic Dialog Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11409/) (2024)
- [Empathetic BERT2BERT Conversational Model: Learning Arabic Language Generation with Little Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04353/) (2021)
- [A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16604/) (2022)
- [Computational Empathy Counteracts the Negative Effects of Anger on Creative Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07178/) (2022)
- [Artificial Empathy Classification: A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques, Datasets, and Evaluation Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00010/) (2023)
- [EmpathyAgent: Can Embodied Agents Conduct Empathetic Actions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16545/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The novel research area of computational empathy is in its infancy and moving towards developing methods and standards. One major problem is the lack of agreement on the evaluation of empathy in artificial interactive systems. Even though the existence of well-established methods from psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience, the translation between these methods and computational empathy is not straightforward. It requires a collective effort to develop metrics that are more suitable for interactive artificial agents. This paper is aimed as an attempt to initiate the dialogue on this important problem. We examine the evaluation methods for empathy in humans and provide suggestions for the development of better metrics to evaluate empathy in artificial agents. We acknowledge the difficulty of arriving at a single solution in a vast variety of interactive systems and propose a set of systematic approaches that can be used with a variety of applications and systems.