A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing
This is an incremental review that addresses conceptual problems in empathy research for NLP, relevant to clinical and educational applications.
The paper identifies issues in empathy research in natural language processing, such as vague definitions and overemphasis on emotional empathy, and argues for a clearer conceptualization including cognitive components to guide future work.
We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.