Empathic Dialogue System based on Emotions Extracted from Tweets

Empathic conversations have increasingly been important for dialogue systems to improve the users’ experience, and increase their engagement with the system, which is difficult for many existing monotonous systems. Existing empathic dialogue systems are designed for limited domain dialogues. They respond fixed phrases toward observed user emotions. In open domain conversations, however, generating empathic responses for a wide variety of topics is required. In this paper, we draw on psychological studies about empathy, and propose an empathic dialogue system in open domain conversations. The proposed system generates empathic utterances based on observed emotions in user utterances, thus is able to build empathy with users. Our experiments have proven that users were able to feel more empathy from the proposed system, especially when their emotions were explicitly expressed in their utterances.