Related papers: EMMA: An Emotion-Aware Wellbeing Chatbot
Rises in the number of animal abuse cases are reported around the world. While chatbots have been effective in influencing their users' perceptions and behaviors, little if any research has hitherto explored the design of chatbots that…
Recent advances in neurosciences and psychology have provided evidence that affective phenomena pervade intelligence at many levels, being inseparable from the cognitionaction loop. Perception, attention, memory, learning, decisionmaking,…
Open-domain dialog systems (also known as chatbots) have increasingly drawn attention in natural language processing. Some of the recent work aims at incorporating affect information into sequence-to-sequence neural dialog modeling, making…
Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of…
With the development of speech large language models (speech LLMs), users can now interact directly with assistants via speech. However, most existing models only convert response content into speech without fully capturing the rich…
This paper presents a web-based demonstration of Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q), a dialog game whose purpose is to study how people describe emotions. EMO20Q can also be used to develop artificially intelligent dialog agents that can…
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence has resulted in the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capacity to produce text that closely resembles human communication. These models have been seamlessly integrated into…
In this work, we present a new dataset and a computational strategy for a digital coach that aims to guide users in practicing the protocols of self-attachment therapy. Our framework augments a rule-based conversational agent with a…
Development in digital technologies has continuously reshaped how individuals seek and receive social and emotional support. While online platforms and communities have long served this need, the increased integration of general-purpose…
One challenge for evaluating current sequence- or dialogue-level chatbots, such as Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models, is to determine whether the chatbot performs in an emotionally consistent way. The most recent work only…
Research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has shown that caring for others, including both humans (e.g., close friends) and computers (e.g., Tamagotchi), can have a positive effect on people's wellbeing. However, we know less about the…
The EMPATHIC project aimed to design an emotionally expressive virtual coach capable of engaging healthy seniors to improve well-being and promote independent aging. One of the core aspects of the system is its human sensing capabilities,…
Mental health concerns are rising globally, prompting increased reliance on technology to address the demand-supply gap in mental health services. In particular, mental health chatbots are emerging as a promising solution, but these remain…
Low technology and eHealth literacy among older adults in retirement communities hinder engagement with digital tools. To address this, we designed an LLM-powered chatbot prototype using a human-centered approach for a local retirement…
Open-domain conversational agents or chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the natural language processing community. One of the challenges is enabling them to converse in an empathetic manner. Current neural response generation…
In collaboration with Postpartum Support International (PSI), a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting caregivers with postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, we developed three chatbots to provide context-specific empathetic…
Voice messages, by nature, prevent users from gauging the emotional tone without fully diving into the audio content. This hinders the shared emotional experience at the pre-retrieval stage. Research scarcely explored "Emotional…
The fields of human-robot interaction (HRI) and embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have long studied how empathy could be implemented in machines. One of the major drivers has been the goal of giving multimodal social and emotional…
An Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) is an intelligent agent that works as the front end of software applications to interact with users through verbal/nonverbal expressions and to provide online assistance without the limits of time,…
Therapeutic art activities, such as expressive drawing and painting, require the synergy between creative visual production and interactive dialogue. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded the capacity…