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Social Support Strategies for Embodied Conversational Agents

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Emotion Modeling

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8750))

Abstract

There is a growing interest in employing conversational agents as companions and coaches. An important skill for this type of agents is providing social support to users after they have an experienced upsetting event. In order to provide social support, conversational agents need to be empathic to the user. In this paper, we specify strategies for conversational agents to provide social support to users. The main contribution of this paper is a mapping between OCC emotion types and support types that can be used to generate emotional behavior in a largely domain-independent way.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    MSN Messenger was an Instant Messaging service provided by Microsoft. It was discontinued in 2013 [22].

  2. 2.

    The virtual buddy’s emotion model is based on FAtiMa’s reactive layer (see [20] for more details).

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under the Responsible Innovation (RI) program via the project ‘Empowering and Protecting Children and Adolescents Against Cyberbullying’.

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Correspondence to Janneke M. van der Zwaan .

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van der Zwaan, J.M., Dignum, V., Jonker, C.M. (2014). Social Support Strategies for Embodied Conversational Agents. In: Bosse, T., Broekens, J., Dias, J., van der Zwaan, J. (eds) Emotion Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8750. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12973-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12973-0_8

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