Empathify at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: Contextualizing Empathy with a BERT-Based Context-Aware Approach for Empathy Detection
Arda Numanoğlu, Süleyman Ateş, Nihan Kesim Çiçekli, Dilek Küçük · 2024
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.