A lot of IT workers suffer from stress in doing their work and there are a few counselors to help them. To cope with this problem, an enhanced context respectful counseling agent is proposed. This counseling agent extracts emotional words from clients' utterances throughout their dialogue to detect their changes and provides clients with such changes as dialogue summary. If no change is detected, it replies with clients' utterances' paraphrases followed by context-respectful prompts to dig/ narrow problems. Especially to continue the conversation towards clients' further reflection, our newly enhanced agent restricts or relates the topics with eventual and emotional words in dialogue sentences. Namely, it asks still context-respectful but self-disclosure type questions to understand the distressed client more correctly or more sincerely. Furthermore, it uses fuzzy reasoning to select an non boring response either from several digging prompts such as “more concretely”, “say more”, “please say it in detail”, etc. or from several sentences in case of no matching of input utterance with the above mentioned paraphrasing patterns. Owing to this enhancement, clients keeping and deepening reflection on themselves without boring in conversation, reach more problem clarification and self-awareness, which enables them to solve their more difficult problems.
['Tetsuo Shinozaki', 'Yukiko Yamamoto', 'Setsuo Tsuruta', 'Ernesto Damiani', 'Rainer Knauf']
Highly enhanced context respectful counseling agent