On the Expression of Agent Emotions in Customer Support Dialogs in Social Media

Providing customer support through social media channels is gaining popularity. In this context, it is important for the agent, either human or automated, to express emotions when needed. In this paper we study the patterns of human agents emotional expression and question the need of Affective NLG. By analyzing real dialogs that were tagged by the crowd, we show that emotional responses contribute to the quality of the dialog and relate to customer satisfaction, and that human agents express emotions by simply adding emotional acknowledgment at the beginning of the response.