Emotional Conversational Agents in Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry

This paper is based on a project at the University of Barcelona to develop the skills to diagnose the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) in students of psychology and psychiatry using a chatbot. The problem we address in this paper is to convert a chatbot in an emotional conversational agent capable of generating a believable and dynamic dialogue in natural language. For it, the dialogues convey traits of personality, emotions and its intensity. We propose to make an AIME language extension for the generation of believable dialogue, this extension will allow to create a more realistic scenario for the student to diagnose the condition simulated by the conversational agent. In order to measure the perception of the emotional state of the ECA expressed by the speech acts a survey was applied.