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Context respectful counseling agent virtualized on the web

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Abstract

Recently, many workers are exposed to distressing situations. However, counselors supporting them lack in number overwhelmingly. To cope with this, a context-respectful counseling agent CRCA virtualized on the Web is proposed. It provides no solution. It paraphrases utterances of users namely clients including those of emotional words showing clients’ emotional changes and adds only context preserving and digging prompts such as “Say in detail” for problem clarification. This keeps clients’ trust to continue the dialogue for promoting their reflection towards self-awareness of solutions. Different from typical conventional counseling agents or chatter bots, CRCA needs no external information from the Web. Because of this and independent data access with clients, CRCAs are scalable so that they can be virtualized on the large scale Web as if there were human counselors in cloud environments, pretending to empathize with clients suffering from their competence, human relationship, etc. Consequently, many distressing persons can concurrently solve problems, supported responsively by WebCRCA namely CRCAs on the Web. Feasibility / effect of CRCA’s solution awareness support in career counseling examples, and real-time performance / scalability of CRCA on the large scale Web are evaluated.

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Acknowledgments

We thank students of Distributed Intelligent Systems Lab in Tokyo Denki University for their help with developing our system. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, Grant Number 23500288.

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Correspondence to Yukiko Yamamoto or Tetsuo Shinozaki.

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Yamamoto, Y., Shinozaki, T., Ikegami, Y. et al. Context respectful counseling agent virtualized on the web. World Wide Web 19, 111–134 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-015-0326-4

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