Empathy requires perspective-taking: empathetic responses require a person to
reason about what another has experienced and communicate that understanding in
language. However, most NLP approaches to empathy do not explicitly model this
alignment process. Here, we introduce a new approach to recognizing alignment
in empathetic speech, grounded in Appraisal Theory. We introduce a new dataset
of over 9.2K span-level annotations of different types of appraisals of a
person's experience and over 3K empathetic alignments between a speaker's and
observer's speech. Through computational experiments, we show that these
appraisals and alignments can be accurately recognized. In experiments in over
9.2M Reddit conversations, we find that appraisals capture meaningful groupings
of behavior but that most responses have minimal alignment. However, we find
that mental health professionals engage with substantially more empathetic
alignment.

通过计算实验，我们向你介绍了一种基于评价理论的识别共情言语中对齐过程的新方法，并证明了这些评价和对齐可以被准确地识别。在超过 9.2M 的 Reddit 会话实验中，我们发现评价能够捕捉行为的有意义的分组，但大多数回应的对齐程度很小。然而，我们发现心理健康专业人士在共情对齐方面参与得更多。