Research Information System
14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, and Social Media Analysis, WASSA 2024, Bangkok, Thailand, 15 August 2024, pp.393-398
Empathy detection from textual data is a complex task that requires an understanding of both the content and context of the text. This study presents a BERT-based context-aware approach to enhance empathy detection in conversations and essays. We participated in the WASSA 2024 Shared Task (Giorgi et al., 2024), focusing on two tracks: empathy and emotion prediction in conversations (CONV-turn) and empathy and distress prediction in essays (EMP). Our approach leverages contextual information by incorporating related articles and emotional characteristics as additional inputs, using BERT-based Siamese (parallel) architecture. Our experiments demonstrated that using article summaries as context significantly improves performance, with the parallel BERT approach outperforming the traditional method of concatenating inputs with the ‘[SEP]‘token. These findings highlight the importance of context-awareness in empathy detection and pave the way for future improvements in the sensitivity and accuracy of such systems. Our system officially ranked 8th at both CONV-T and EMP tracks.