Labels Generated by Large Language Model Helps Measuring People's Empathy in Vitro

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionised numerous fields, with LLM-as-a-service (LLMSaaS) having a strong generalisation ability that offers accessible solutions directly without the need for costly training. In contrast to the widely studied prompt engineering for task solving directly (in vivo), this paper explores its potential in in-vitro applications. These involve using LLM to generate labels to help the supervised training of mainstream models by (1) noisy label correction and (2) training data augmentation with LLM-generated labels. In this paper, we evaluate this approach in the emerging field of empathy computing -- automating the prediction of psychological questionnaire outcomes from inputs like text sequences. Specifically, crowdsourced datasets in this domain often suffer from noisy labels that misrepresent underlying empathy. By leveraging LLM-generated labels to train pre-trained language models (PLMs) like RoBERTa, we achieve statistically significant accuracy improvements over baselines, achieving a state-of-the-art Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.648 on NewsEmp benchmarks. In addition, we bring insightful discussions, including current challenges in empathy computing, data biases in training data and evaluation metric selection. Code and LLM-generated data are available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLMPathy (available once the paper is accepted).