Validation of Context Respectful Counseling Agent

Many IT workers suffer from stress in doing their work and there are a few counselors to help them. To cope with this, a context respectful counseling agent (CRECA) is proposed. This agent extracts emotional words from clients' utterances throughout their dialogue to detect emotion changes and provides clients such changes as a dialogue summary. If no change is detected, it replies with paraphrases of clients' utterances followed by context-respectful prompts to narrow problems. The summary responses promote the reflection of clients. This way, the counseling agent can pretend to keep recognizing clients' psychological sufferings. 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 information from clients' sayings and the summaries focused on the change in their emotions, there occur few problems of knowledge explosion and knowledge maintenance. An experiment verifies that our new agent with summarization function more effective than the agent without summarization function (Old CRECA) and ELIZA.