In this work, we present a new dataset and a computational strategy for a digital coach that aims to guide users in practicing the protocols of self-attachment therapy. Our framework augments a rule-based conversational agent with a deep-learning classifier for identifying the underlying emotion in a user's text response, as well as a deep-learning assisted retrieval method for producing novel, fluent and empathetic utterances. We also craft a set of human-like personas that users can choose to interact with. Our goal is to achieve a high level of engagement during virtual therapy sessions. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework in a non-clinical trial with N=16 participants, all of whom have had at least four interactions with the agent over the course of five days. We find that our platform is consistently rated higher for empathy, user engagement and usefulness than the simple rule-based framework. Finally, we provide guidelines to further improve the design and performance of the application, in accordance with the feedback received.
Style is an integral part of natural language in written, spoken or machine generated forms. Humans have been dealing with style in language since the beginnings of language itself, but computers and machine processes have only recently begun to process natural language styles. Automatic processing of styles poses two interrelated challenges: classification and transformation. There have been recent advances in corpus classification, automatic clustering and authorship attribution along many dimensions but little work directly related to writing styles directly and even less in transformation. In this paper we examine relevant literature to define and operationalize a notion of "style" which we employ to designate style markers usable in classification machines. A measurable reading of these markers also helps guide style transformation algorithms. We demonstrate the concept by showing a detectable stylistic shift in a sample piece of text relative to a target corpus. We present ongoing work in building a comprehensive style recognition and transformation system and discuss our results.
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