Towards humanlike chatbots helping users cope with stressful situations

Lenin Medeiros*, Charlotte Gerritsen, Tibor Bosse

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Many researchers are studying the application of computer-generated emotional support to increase well-being in humans. In this chapter, we investigate some challenges related to the development of effective stress support bots. We developed a chatbot for Facebook Messenger that, using IBM Watson’s text mining and machine learning capabilities, can carry out small dialogues with its users and recognise when they are talking about stressful daily-life events. Based on previous studies, our presented bot provides emotionally supportive text messages tailored to the stressors users share with it. Two groups of specialists have interacted with our software and provided useful insights via focus groups. Based on the results of the focus groups, a number of recommendations have been formulated to further improve stress support bots. In future work, we plan to address all the feedback obtained during this study, as well as to conduct an experiment to investigate to what extent our chatbot is able to make people cope with their daily-life stressful situations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputational Collective Intelligence
Subtitle of host publication11th International Conference, ICCCI 2019, Hendaye, France, September 4–6, 2019, Proceedings
EditorsNgoc Thanh Nguyen, Richard Chbeir, Ernesto Exposito, Philippe Aniorté, Bogdan Trawinski, Ngoc Thanh Nguyen
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages232-243
Number of pages12
Volume1
ISBN (Electronic)9783030283773
ISBN (Print)9783030283766
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event11th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2019 - Hendaye, France
Duration: 4 Sept 20196 Sept 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11683 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2019
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityHendaye
Period4/09/196/09/19

Keywords

  • Chatbots
  • Computer-generated emotional support
  • Conversational agents
  • Emotion regulation
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Stress
  • Text mining

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