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A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support

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arxiv 2009.08441 v1 pith:UKTHFUEP submitted 2020-09-17 cs.CL cs.SI

classification cs.CLcs.SI
keywords empathyhealthmentaltext-basedapproachconversationssupportunderstanding
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Empathy is critical to successful mental health support. Empathy measurement has predominantly occurred in synchronous, face-to-face settings, and may not translate to asynchronous, text-based contexts. Because millions of people use text-based platforms for mental health support, understanding empathy in these contexts is crucial. In this work, we present a computational approach to understanding how empathy is expressed in online mental health platforms. We develop a novel unifying theoretically-grounded framework for characterizing the communication of empathy in text-based conversations. We collect and share a corpus of 10k (post, response) pairs annotated using this empathy framework with supporting evidence for annotations (rationales). We develop a multi-task RoBERTa-based bi-encoder model for identifying empathy in conversations and extracting rationales underlying its predictions. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively identify empathic conversations. We further apply this model to analyze 235k mental health interactions and show that users do not self-learn empathy over time, revealing opportunities for empathy training and feedback.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    LLM-based scoring of 1,610 therapy sessions finds therapist empathy and exploration are followed by more client disclosure, while prior-session rapport is associated with less self-directed negative emotion—but the cl...

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    General health queries can be labeled in advance for whether they call for emotional reactions or interpretive empathy, and classifiers trained on these labels beat simple baselines.

  3. From Reddit to Generative AI: Evaluating Large Language Models for Anxiety Support Fine-tuned on Social Media Data

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    Fine-tuning GPT-3.5 and Llama 2 on r/Anxiety posts improves readability but raises toxicity and bias while reducing empathy and reflection.

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    LEAP, an LLM-based library, automatically selects ML functions and writes SQL-like code to answer 92% of 120 social science queries over unstructured data on the first attempt, and 100% within three attempts.

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    In chat conversations, users rate AI chatbots as less empathetic than humans but still give the chatbot conversations higher quality ratings.

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  8. AI-Augmented LLMs Achieve Therapist-Level Responses in Motivational Interviewing

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  9. From Interaction to Attitude: Exploring the Impact of Human-AI Cooperation on Mental Illness Stigma

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