Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories

Computational detection and understanding of empathy is an important factor in advancing human-computer interaction. Yet to date, text-based empathy prediction has the following major limitations: It underestimates the psychological complexity of the phenomenon, adheres to a weak notion of ground truth where empathic states are ascribed by third parties, and lacks a shared corpus. In contrast, this contribution presents the first publicly available gold standard for empathy prediction. It is constructed using a novel annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the writer of a statement using multi-item scales. This is also the first computational work distinguishing between multiple forms of empathy, empathic concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology. Finally, we present experimental results for three different predictive models, of which a CNN performs the best.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 201

LOGEN: Few-shot Logical Knowledge-Conditioned Text Generation with Self-training

Natural language generation from structured data mainly focuses on surface-level descriptions, suffering from uncontrollable content selection and low fidelity. Previous works leverage logical forms to facilitate logical knowledge-conditioned text generation. Though achieving remarkable progress, they are data-hungry, which makes the adoption for real-world applications challenging with limited data. To this end, this paper proposes a unified framework for logical knowledge-conditioned text generation in the few-shot setting. With only a few seeds logical forms (e.g., 20/100 shot), our approach leverages self-training and samples pseudo logical forms based on content and structure consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can obtain better few-shot performance than baselines.Comment: Work in progres

Conception: Multilingually-Enhanced, Human-Readable Concept Vector Representations

To date, the most successful word, word sense, and concept modelling techniques have used large corpora and knowledge resources to produce dense vector representations that capture semantic similarities in a relatively low-dimensional space. Most current approaches, however, suffer from a monolingual bias, with their strength depending on the amount of data available across languages. In this paper we address this issue and propose Conception, a novel technique for building language-independent vector representations of concepts which places multilinguality at its core while retaining explicit relationships between concepts. Our approach results in high-coverage representations that outperform the state of the art in multilingual and cross-lingual Semantic Word Similarity and Word Sense Disambiguation, proving particularly robust on low-resource languages. Conception – its software and the complete set of representations – is available at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/conception