Empathy and Distress Detection using Ensembles of Transformer Models
This work addresses the challenge of understanding human emotions in conversations for natural language processing applications, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting empathy and distress in natural language discourses, achieving a Pearson's r score of 0.346 and placing third in the WASSA 2023 shared task.
This paper presents our approach for the WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task. Empathy and distress are human feelings that are implicitly expressed in natural discourses. Empathy and distress detection are crucial challenges in Natural Language Processing that can aid our understanding of conversations. The provided dataset consists of several long-text examples in the English language, with each example associated with a numeric score for empathy and distress. We experiment with several BERT-based models as a part of our approach. We also try various ensemble methods. Our final submission has a Pearson's r score of 0.346, placing us third in the empathy and distress detection subtask.