Tetsuo Shinozaki

Context respectful counseling agent virtualized on the web

Recently, many workers are exposed to distressing situations. However, counselors supporting them lack in number overwhelmingly. To cope with this, a context-respectful counseling agent CRCA virtualized on the Web is proposed. It provides no solution. It paraphrases utterances of users namely clients including those of emotional words showing clients’ emotional changes and adds only context preserving and digging prompts such as “Say in detail” for problem clarification. This keeps clients’ trust to continue the dialogue for promoting their reflection towards self-awareness of solutions. Different from typical conventional counseling agents or chatter bots, CRCA needs no external information from the Web. Because of this and independent data access with clients, CRCAs are scalable so that they can be virtualized on the large scale Web as if there were human counselors in cloud environments, pretending to empathize with clients suffering from their competence, human relationship, etc. Consequently, many distressing persons can concurrently solve problems, supported responsively by WebCRCA namely CRCAs on the Web. Feasibility / effect of CRCA’s solution awareness support in career counseling examples, and real-time performance / scalability of CRCA on the large scale Web are evaluated.

Context-based Reflection Support Counseling Agent

The success rate of IT system development projects has remained as low as 30 %, resulting in that more than 60 % of workers have suffered from problems. This paper proposes a software agent to replace rudimentary-level human counselors. The agent uses a counseling knowledge whose domain is limited to IT workers or students. Counseling differs from learning support whose problems are clear and well-understood by teachers. Furthermore, teachers fundamentally know their solutions. It also differs from psychotherapy whose problems as well as solutions are less clear and much more general (i.e., not domain-specific). Utilizing domain knowledge focused on IT related counseling, our proposed counseling agent can: 1) support identification of the clients problem by building up mutual trust and empathy, and 2) promote the clients further clarification of their problems towards self-awareness of solutions by means of reflection solicited by ELIZA-like but context-dependent dialogue. Exploiting the context as well as the limited domain of problems makes the counseling software agent easily realized without acquiring and managing a tremendous amount of knowledge. The preliminary experimental results for six students showed that the agent can replace rudimentary-level human counselors. Namely, though incorporated with just limited knowledge, it can promote clients to enable more self-reflection e.g. by continuing 3 times longer dialogue than ELIZA and more self-awareness e.g. according to questionnaires, sufficient in the proposed agent but insufficient in ELIZA.