Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares For You
This work addresses the need for more engaging and human-like conversational AI for users seeking social interaction, though it appears incremental by balancing traditional approaches with new abilities.
The authors tackled the problem of creating a social chatbot that focuses on experience-sharing and opinion-oriented exchanges, rather than just information-sharing, resulting in Emora, a chatbot that supports collaborative understanding and learning of users' life experiences.
Inspired by studies on the overwhelming presence of experience-sharing in human-human conversations, Emora, the social chatbot developed by Emory University, aims to bring such experience-focused interaction to the current field of conversational AI. The traditional approach of information-sharing topic handlers is balanced with a focus on opinion-oriented exchanges that Emora delivers, and new conversational abilities are developed that support dialogues that consist of a collaborative understanding and learning process of the partner's life experiences. We present a curated dialogue system that leverages highly expressive natural language templates, powerful intent classification, and ontology resources to provide an engaging and interesting conversational experience to every user.