Does GPT-3 Generate Empathetic Dialogues? A Novel In-Context Example Selection Method and Automatic Evaluation Metric for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Since empathy plays a crucial role in increasing social bonding between people, many studies have designed their own dialogue agents to be empathetic using the well-established method of fine-tuning. However, they do not use prompt-based in-context learning, which has shown powerful performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, for empathetic dialogue generation. Although several studies have investigated few-shot in-context learning for empathetic dialogue generation, an in-depth analysis of the generation of empathetic dialogue with in-context learning remains unclear, especially in GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020). In this study, we explore whether GPT-3 can generate empathetic dialogues through prompt-based in-context learning in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. To enhance performance, we propose two new in-context example selection methods, called SITSM and EMOSITSM, that utilize emotion and situational information. We also introduce a new automatic evaluation method, DIFF-EPITOME, which reflects the human tendency to express empathy. From the analysis, we reveal that our DIFF-EPITOME is effective in measuring the degree of human empathy. We show that GPT-3 achieves competitive performance with Blender 90M, a state-of-the-art dialogue generative model, on both automatic and human evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/passing2961/EmpGPT-3.