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Empathy and Persona of English vs. Arabic Chatbots: A Survey and Future Directions

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Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2022)

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Abstract

There is a high demand for chatbots across a wide range of sectors. Human-like chatbots engage meaningfully in dialogues while interpreting and expressing emotions and being consistent through understanding the user’s personality. Though substantial progress has been achieved in developing empathetic chatbots for English, work on Arabic chatbots is still in its early stages due to various challenges associated with the language constructs and dialects. This survey reviews recent literature on approaches to empathetic response generation, persona modelling and datasets for developing chatbots in the English language. In addition, it presents the challenges of applying these approaches to Arabic and outlines some solutions. We focus on open-domain chatbots developed as end-to-end generative systems due to their capabilities to learn and infer language and emotions. Accordingly, we create four open problems pertaining to gaps in Arabic and English work; namely, (1) feature representation learning based on multiple dialects; (2) modelling the various facets of a persona and emotions; (3) datasets; and (4) evaluation metrics.

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Acknowledgments

This work was made possible by NPRP13S-0112-200037 grant from Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering Department, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    Omama Hamad & Khaled Shaban

  2. Computer Science School, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Ali Hamdi

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  1. Omama Hamad
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Correspondence to Omama Hamad .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Sojka

  2. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Aleš Horák

  3. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Ivan Kopeček

  4. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Karel Pala

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Hamad, O., Hamdi, A., Shaban, K. (2022). Empathy and Persona of English vs. Arabic Chatbots: A Survey and Future Directions. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13502. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16270-1_43

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16270-1_43

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