Conversational technologies are transforming the landscape of human-machine interaction. Chatbots are increasingly being used in several domains to substitute human agents in performing tasks, answering questions, giving advice, and providing social and emotional support. Therefore, improving user satisfaction with these technologies is imperative for their successful integration. Researchers are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to impart emotional intelligence capabilities in chatbots. This study provides a systematic review of research on developing emotionally intelligent chatbots. We employ a systematic approach to gather and analyze 42 articles published in the last decade. The review is aimed at providing a comprehensive analysis of past research to discover the problems addressed, the techniques used, and the evaluation measures employed by studies in embedding emotion in chatbot conversations. The study’s findings reveal that most studies are based on an open-domain generative chatbot architecture. Researchers mainly address the issue of accurately detecting the user’s emotion and generating emotionally relevant responses. Nearly 57% of the studies use an enhanced Seq2Seq encoding and decoding of the input of the conversational model. Almost all the studies use both the automatic and manual evaluation measures to evaluate the chatbots, with the BLEU measure being the most popular method for objective evaluation.
Conversational technologies are revolutionizing how organizations communicate with people, thereby raising quick responses and constant availability expectations. Students often have queries about the institutional and academic policies and procedures, academic progression, activities, and more in an academic environment. In reality, the student services team and the academic advisors are overwhelmed with several queries that they cannot provide instant responses to, resulting in dissatisfaction with services. Our study leverages Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language processing technologies to build a bilingual chatbot that interacts with students in the English and Arabic languages. The conversational agent is built in Python and designed for students to support advising-related queries. We use a purpose-built domain-specific corpus consisting of the common questions advisors receive from students and their responses as the chatbots knowledge base. The chatbot engine determines the user intent by processing the input and retrieves the most appropriate response that matches the intent with an accuracy of 80% in English and 75% in Arabic. We also evaluated the chatbot interface by conducting field experiments with students to test the accuracy of the chatbot with real-time input and test the application interface.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.