TEATIME: A Formal Model of Action Tendencies in Conversational Agents

This paper presents a formal model of socio-affective behaviour in a conversational agent based on the Action Tendency theory. This theory defines emotions as tendencies to perform an action. This theory allows us to implement a strong connection between emotions and speech acts during an agent-human interaction. Our model presents an agent architecture with beliefs, desires, ideals and capacities. It relies on 6 appraisal variables for the selection of different emotional strategies depending on the context of the dialogue. It also supports social regulation of emotions depending on social rules. We implemented this model in an agent architecture and we give an example of dialogue with a virtual insurance expert in the context of customer relationship management.

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