# SYNTHEMPATHY: A Scalable Empathy Corpus Generated Using LLMs Without Any Crowdsourcing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17857 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17857/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (2020)
- [SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00273/) (2023)
- [Chain of Empathy: Enhancing Empathetic Response of Large Language Models Based on Psychotherapy Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04915/) (2023)
- [Improving Contextual Coherence in Variational Personalized and Empathetic Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05971/) (2022)
- [Emotion-Aware Transformer Encoder for Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11320/) (2022)

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

- [Kardia-R1: Unleashing LLMs to Reason toward Understanding and Empathy for Emotional Support via Rubric-as-Judge Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01282/) (2025)
- [A Review of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00003/) (2025)
- [Mixed Signals: Understanding Model Disagreement in Multimodal Empathy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13979/) (2025)
- [Detecting Mental Manipulation in Speech via Synthetic Multi-Speaker Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08342/) (2026)
- [Low-Agreeableness Persona Conditioning for Safe LLM Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27709/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)
- [From Pattern Recognizers to Personalized Companions: A Survey of Large Language Models in Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25186/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Previous research has shown that humans are more receptive towards language models that that exhibit empathetic behavior. While empathy is essential for developing helpful dialogue agents, very few large corpora containing empathetic dialogues are available for fine-tune LLMs. The few existing corpora have largely relied on crowdsourcing to simulate empathetic conversations, a process that is expensive, time-consuming, and not scalable to larger datasets. We propose a data generation framework for developing SYNTHEMPATHY, a large corpus containing 105k empathetic responses to real-life situations compiled through LLM generation. A base Mistral 7B model fine-tuned on our SYNTHEMPATHY corpus exhibits an increase in the average empathy score.