Seeking an Empathy-abled Conversational Agent

A fairly novel area of research, at the conjunction between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), resides in developing conversational agents as more users prefer this type of interaction to conventional interfaces. In this paper, we present an open-domain empathic chatbot, encompassing two of the biggest challenges of dialog systems: understanding emotions and offering appropriate responses. Although these tasks are trivial for a human, it is difficult to create a system that can recognize others' feelings in a discussion. The proposed model is developed based on the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and it uses two datasets, PersonaChat and Empathetic Dialogues to achieve an empathic chatbot with a cordial personality. The measured performance -18.20 perplexity, 6.56 BLEU score, and 6.56 accuracy -comes close to the state-of-the-art models, while offering a further refined dialogue persona.