An Affective Utility Model of User Motivation for Counselling Dialogue Systems

Counselling dialogue systems are designed to help users to change and monitor their behaviours in order to achieve beneficial goals, such as the acquisition of healthy habits. To be effective, it is important that these systems include a model that accounts for the effort that users are investing to achieve the goals. However, most of the systems available nowadays carry out a naive calculation based on the attained results, rather than on the reasons behind the successes or failures and their consequences for future user behaviour. In contrast to this, in this paper we propose a model that characterizes user motivation considering various aspects of psychological theories on subjective expected utility and attribution. Moreover, we provide a specification that allows carrying out calculations that replicate the users’ decision-making process considering its emotional implications. The model is general-purpose and can be employed in standard architectures to make interpretations that adapt to each user, thus fostering more flexible and personalized interactions.