Unveiling Empathic Triggers in Online Interactions via Empathy Cause Identification

ACL ARR 2025 July Submission170 Authors

Abstract: Effectively learning language patterns that provoke empathetic expression is vital to creating emotionally intelligent technologies; however, this problem has historically been overlooked. We address this gap by proposing the new task of empathy cause identification: a challenging task aimed at pinpointing specific triggers prompting empathetic responses in communicative settings. We correspondingly introduce AcnEmpathize-Cause, a novel dataset consisting of 4K cause-identified sentences, and explore various models to evaluate and demonstrate the dataset's efficacy. This research not only contributes to the understanding of empathy in textual communication but also paves the way for the development of AI systems capable of more nuanced and supportive interactions.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

Research Area Keywords: emotion detection and analysis

Contribution Types: Data resources

Languages Studied: english

Submission Number: 170