Applying Context Respectful Summarization to Counseling Agent for the Japanese

This paper proposes a counseling agent by ELIZA-like but much more human-centered (we call "context- respectful") dialogue, respecting human namely clients' suffering situation/ context. Towards self-awareness of solutions through reflection, this reflection agent can perform context-respectful support. Building up mutual trust or empathizing with the client and keeping it, this agent supports clients to identify and clarify/ dig their problem using problem-clarification words and summarizing several client's events and emotions. The summarization condenses the essence and/or detects the inconsistencies of what clients said, which encourage clients reflect themselves to their problem clarification. In other words, the summarization is considered as paraphrasing in not only a single dialog step (ELIZA-like mirroring in some means) but also several steps of a dialog. This context-respectful text summarization, keeping the counseling conversation continuing, promotes the clients' deeper clarification of the problem through self-reflection towards clients' self-awareness of solutions. Further, utilizing the context /situation based software decomposition as well as limiting the problem domain makes the counseling software agent easily realized with-out acquiring and managing a tremendous amount of knowledge. The pre-evaluation shows the promising result of the method.