Towards Empathic Conversational Interaction

In recent years, "computational empathy" has emerged as a new challenging research field. Computational empathy investigates how artificial agents can manifest empathic behaviours towards the user, and how they can elicit empathy during the human-agent interaction. Such "empathic agents" have the capacity to place themselves into the emotional position of a user (or another agent), and behave taking such emotional understanding into account. The paper explores a computational empathy approach in the context of conversational interaction, and presents an empathic conversational framework grounded on the empathy theory. The framework provides a conceptual tool for designing and evaluating empathic conversational agents. Overall, our research contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of empathy in conversational interaction.