Utterance as A Bridge: Few-shot Joint Learning of Empathy Detection and Empathy Intent Classification

Empathy detection (ED) and empathy intent classification (EIC) aim to identify the empathy direction expressed in user utterances and the underlying empathy intent behind them. Previous studies show that facilitating information transfer between tasks can enhance model performance. However, the interaction between ED and EIC in few-shot learning remains underexplored. To this end, we identify the challenges in jointly training ED and EIC in a few-shot setting: establishing effective information transfer between them and improving the model’s generalization capability. We propose a novel model called USB. For information transfer, the interactive module maps empathy and empathy intent labels through utterances to model task correlations. For generalization capability, after capturing empathy and empathy intent representations with an adaptive fusion module, we introduce a multi-level contrastive learning strategy to optimize representations at task and label levels, enhancing generalization. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our model outperforms all baselines.