A Multilingual Approach to Narrative-based Empathic Similarity
Authors: Anjali Singh, Debaditya Pal, Cheng-Han Wu, Jing-Wen Chen, Yash Bengali


Reviewer paper summaries: This short paper tries to assess the modeling of empathic similarity in multilingual contexts and mainly uses large language models for both, machine translation of the datasets into the target languages of Mandarin, Spanish, German, French and Hindi and for measuring the resulting similarity with respect to empathy signaled in these texts.
Summary of strengths: - experimentation is supported by human evaluation and statistical significance analysis
Summary of weaknesses: - lack of problem description: why modeling emphatic similarity really is interesting?
- why is it needed in a multilingual setting at all?
- lack of error analysis
Comments, suggestions and typos: - please provide clarifying examples of e.g a source sentence with mentioned empathy, a target sentence showing the same and overall a better description of what the problem really is, or the use case that you are trying to solve
- what can go wrong in the whole pipeline? how do e.g. translation errors propagate? etc.?
- the inter-annotator agreement is very low, across languages -- what was the issue here?
Overall assessment scores: 2