CERG : Chinese Emotional Response Generator with Retrieval Method

The dialogue system has always been one of the important topics in the domain of artificial intelligence. So far, most of the mature dialogue systems are task-oriented based, while non-task-oriented dialogue systems still have a lot of room for improvement. We propose a data-driven non-task-oriented dialogue generator “CERG” based on neural networks. This model has the emotion recognition capability and can generate corresponding responses. The data set we adopt comes from the NTCIR-14 STC-3 CECG subtask, which contains more than 1.7 million Chinese Weibo post-response pairs and 6 emotion categories. We try to concatenate the post and the response with the emotion, then mask the response part of the input text character by character to emulate the encoder-decoder framework. We use the improved transformer blocks as the core to build the model and add regularization methods to alleviate the problems of overcorrection and exposure bias. We introduce the retrieval method to the inference process to improve the semantic relevance of generated responses. The results of the manual evaluation show that our proposed model can make different responses to different emotions to improve the human-computer interaction experience. This model can be applied to lots of domains, such as automatic reply robots of social application

Empathetic Response Generation with State Management

A good empathetic dialogue system should first track and understand a user's emotion and then reply with an appropriate emotion. However, current approaches to this task either focus on improving the understanding of users' emotion or on proposing better responding strategies, and very few works consider both at the same time. Our work attempts to fill this vacancy. Inspired by task-oriented dialogue systems, we propose a novel empathetic response generation model with emotion-aware dialogue management. The emotion-aware dialogue management contains two parts: (1) Emotion state tracking maintains the current emotion state of the user and (2) Empathetic dialogue policy selection predicts a target emotion and a user's intent based on the results of the emotion state tracking. The predicted information is then used to guide the generation of responses. Experimental results show that dynamically managing different information can help the model generate more empathetic responses compared with several baselines under both automatic and human evaluations

Is moral elevation an approach-oriented emotion?

Two studies were designed to test whether moral elevation should be conceptualized as an approach-oriented emotion. The studies examined the relationship between moral elevation and the behavioral activation and inhibition systems. Study 1 (N = 80) showed that individual differences in moral elevation were associated with individual differences in behavioral activation but not inhibition. Study 2 (N = 78) showed that an elevation-inducing video promoted equally high levels of approach orientation as an anger-inducing video and significantly higher levels of approach orientation than a control video. Furthermore, the elevation-inducing stimulus (vs. the control condition) significantly promoted prosocial motivation and this effect was sequentially mediated by feelings of moral elevation followed by an approach-oriented state. Overall the results show unambiguous support for the proposal that moral elevation is an approach-oriented emotion. Applied and theoretical implications are discussed

The SEMAINE API: Towards a Standards-Based Framework for Building Emotion-Oriented Systems

This paper presents the SEMAINE API, an open source framework for building emotion-oriented systems. By encouraging and simplifying the use of standard representation formats, the framework aims to contribute to interoperability and reuse of system components in the research community. By providing a Java and C++ wrapper around a message-oriented middleware, the API makes it easy to integrate components running on different operating systems and written in different programming languages. The SEMAINE system 1.0 is presented as an example of a full-scale system built on top of the SEMAINE API. Three small example systems are described in detail to illustrate how integration between existing and new components is realised with minimal effort

Emotion-driven interactive storytelling.

Interactive storytelling has attracted plenty of research interest in recent years. Most current interactive storytelling systems follow a goal-oriented approach to story representation, i.e. the user is engaged with the story through fulfilling a number of goals rather than empathising with the characters and experiencing anenriched emotional experience (Pizzi and Cavazza 2007). This fails to satisfy potential users who are oriented to traditional media, such as movies (Louchart et al. 2008) and demographic groups who are interested in attractive and challenging stories (Duh et al. 2010). Given this consideration, an emotion-driven interactive storytelling approach is proposed in this research. In contrast to the goal-oriented interactive storytelling approach, emotion-driven interactive storytelling attempts to create an engaging emotional experience, and involve the user’s emotion with the characters. More importantly, the user’s emotions, evoked by empathising with the characters, determine the character’s behaviours and therefore have an impact on the whole storyline. In this sense, emotions, as a driving force, directly and explicitly contribute to storytelling and the user experience. An interactive video was made by re-editing existing TV material to interpret the concept of emotion-driven interactive storytelling. The examination of user experience of playing this interactive video revealed that non-gamers were more likely to be emotionally involved with the interactive video and empathise with the character. Participants in this group also exhibited higher enjoyment and engagement than gamers. In addition, females were found more likely to empathise with the character and satisfy with the storyline. However because the TV material used to make the interactive video was female-oriented, males failed to enjoy and engage themselves as much as females. But it is important to note that in comparison to males’ previous experience of watching TV Ugly Betty, emotion-driven interactive storytelling increased their enjoyment and engagement. Therefore, emotion-driven interactive storytelling enriches the approach to developing interactive storytelling systems and has the potential to provide an engaging user experience to some types of users. Future research possibilities are discussed with respect to a wider population and research where materials suitable for both genders are presented

Stress Coping Styles in Family and Relatives of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Patients in the South of Iran:Application of Lazarus and Folkman’s Theory of Stress Coping

Background: The ongoing outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a major challenge for mental health care systems and causes and exacerbates mental anxiety. Objective: This study sought to investigate the coping styles of stress in families and relatives of COVID-19 patients in the south of Iran, according to Lazarus and Folkman’s Transactional theory of Stress coping model. Methods: The present cross-sectional study was performed in the period from March 5 to July 5, 2020. Data collection was done electronically using a standard questionnaire on Lazarus and Folkman’s coping methods. Finally, the output data of the electronic questionnaire were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results: A total of 276 people participated in the present study. There was a statistically significant difference between age and all emotion-oriented coping style domains (P &lt;0.05), except planful problem solving (P = 0.817) and positive reappraisal (P = 0.153). The results of the present study showed that from the emotion-oriented coping, the domain of self-controlling (%55.9) received an unfavorable score, but in the problem-oriented coping (60.02%), the two domains of social support (%71.27) and positive reappraisal (70%) obtained scores above 50%. Conclusion: Families and relatives need help to improve coping with stress in the area of self-controlling. The results of the present study showed that emotion-oriented coping (self-controlling) had less effect on family stress than problem-oriented coping (domains of social support and positive reappraisal). Also, with domains of social support and positive reappraisal, the stress in the families was reduced. Factors influencing coping styles were age, literacy, source of information, and underlying disease. Since the COVID-19 pandemic condition is a unique stressful situation, it is necessary to implement psychological and educational interventions to gain the ability to control stress, especially in relatives with COVID-19.</p

Online reservation systems in e-Business: analyzing decision making in e-Tourism

Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide and in general, the Internet continues to gain importance in the tourism sector. The study focuses on exploration of knowledge of online booking systems and on the views of local students-users concerning the booking rate based on these online systems. Another perspective of this project is to investigate the decision-making process (emotion-focused) that they follow in order to choose a tourist destination via online booking systems. For the purposes of this study, three scales were administered E-WOM and Accommodation Scale, Emotion-Based Decision-Making Scale and Trait Emotional Intelligence Scale. Then, survey data were collected, preprocessed and analyzed based on Data Mining techniques evaluating the results. More specifically, classification and association algorithms were utilized to manage to describe hidden patterns. E-Tourism will continue to be oriented towards the consumers and the technology that surrounds them, providing dynamic communication in electronic business

Online reservation systems in e-Business: Analyzing decision making in e-Tourism

Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide and in general, the Internet continues to gain importance in the tourism sector. The study focuses on exploration of knowledge of online booking systems and on the views of local students-users concerning the booking rate based on these online systems. Another perspective of this project is to investigate the decision-making process (emotion-focused) that they follow in order to choose a tourist destination via online booking systems. For the purposes of this study, three scales were administered E-WOM and Accommodation Scale, Emotion-Based Decision-Making Scale and Trait Emotional Intelligence Scale. Then, survey data were collected, preprocessed and analyzed based on Data Mining techniques evaluating the results. More specifically, classification and association algorithms were utilized to manage to describe hidden patterns. E-Tourism will continue to be oriented towards the consumers and the technology that surrounds them, providing dynamic communication in electronic business