Detecting Empathy in Speech

Empathy is the ability to understand another’s feelings as if we were having those feelings ourselves. It has been shown to increase to people’s trust and likability. Much research has been done on creating empathetic responses in text in conversational systems, yet little work has been done to identify the acoustic-prosodic speech features that can create an empathetic-sounding voice. Our contributions include 1) collection of a new empathy speech dataset, 2) identifying interpretable acoustic-prosodic features that contribute to empathy expression and 3) benchmarking the empathy detection task.