  We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and
identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract,
which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3)
emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of
simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue
that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that
includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are
to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research
objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities
in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.
