  Empathy requires perspective-taking: empathetic responses require a person to
reason about what another has experienced and communicate that understanding in
language. However, most NLP approaches to empathy do not explicitly model this
alignment process. Here, we introduce a new approach to recognizing alignment
in empathetic speech, grounded in Appraisal Theory. We introduce a new dataset
of over 9.2K span-level annotations of different types of appraisals of a
person's experience and over 3K empathetic alignments between a speaker's and
observer's speech. Through computational experiments, we show that these
appraisals and alignments can be accurately recognized. In experiments in over
9.2M Reddit conversations, we find that appraisals capture meaningful groupings
of behavior but that most responses have minimal alignment. However, we find
that mental health professionals engage with substantially more empathetic
alignment.
