Empathy Prediction from Diverse Perspectives

A person's perspective on a topic can influence their empathy towards a story. To investigate the use of personal perspective in empathy prediction, we collected a dataset, Empa-thyFromPerspectives, where a user rates their empathy towards a story by a person with a different perspective on a prompted topic. We observed in the dataset that user perspective can be important for empathy prediction and developed a model, PPEP, that uses a rater's perspective as context for predicting the rater's empathy towards a story. Experiments comparing PPEP with baseline models show that use of personal perspective significantly improves performance. A user study indicated that human empathy ratings of stories generally agreed with PPEP's relative empathy rankings.