An emotional word focused counseling agent and its evaluation

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 emotional word focused 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. This way, the counseling agent can pretend to keep recognizing clients' psychological sufferings as contexts or situations. It behaves as if it empathized with clients and continues talking to clients without losing their trust. Keeping reflection on themselves, clients reach more problem clarification and self-awareness, which enables them to solve their problems. Since the agent provides only the information on clients' sayings and the summaries focused on the change in their emotions, there occur few problems of knowledge explosion and knowledge maintenance. Python was used for implementing this agent. The effect on the counseling was experimentally evaluated.