Facilitating Cross-lingual Transfer of Empathy through Language-independent Latent Diffusion: A Case Study in Chinese

AbstractHuman empathy builds on the shared pragmatic common ground among different languages. However, existing human empathy data is limited to English. Inspired by multilingual coactivation as the neurocognitive underpinning of human bilingual proficiency, which predicts empathy, we integrate language-independent diffusion processes to facilitate the cross-lingual transfer of empathy. Taking Chinese language varieties as the target domain, automatic and human evaluations demonstrate successful transfers of source empathy into target contexts without compromising linguistic naturalness. The results of this work offer empirical clues on the importance of pragmatic transferability of empathy and its cross-lingual effects in conversation.