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Using Crowdsourcing for the Development of Online Emotional Support Agents

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Highlights of Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complexity: The PAAMS Collection (PAAMS 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 887))

Abstract

This paper describes several steps towards the development of an online agent (or socialbot) that provides emotional support to stressed users. In particular, we present an empirical study that was conducted with the aim to investigate how people help each other to cope with stressful situations via online social networks. To this end, around 10.000 tweets about stressful situations were collected. Then, using crowdsourcing, these tweets were classified into stress categories, and supportive replies to them were collected, which were also classified into categories. Contingency tables were constructed in order to explore which types of support were most frequently used in which circumstances. The resulting values can be used as parameters for a previously developed algorithm that automatically constructs support messages. This allows our agent to generate supportive messages that are more similar to the support messages that human beings send via social media.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://mlab.com/databases/collected_data_from_twitter.

  2. 2.

    https://goo.gl/w49Zv3.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Brazilian government and to state that Lenin Medeiros’ stay at VU Amsterdam was funded by Science without Borders/CNPq (reference number: 235134/2014-7).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Behavioural Informatics Group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Lenin Medeiros & Tibor Bosse

Authors
  1. Lenin Medeiros
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  2. Tibor Bosse
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lenin Medeiros .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Javier Bajo

  2. Departamento de Informática y Automática, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Juan M. Corchado

  3. Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    Elena María Navarro Martínez

  4. TECNALIA, Derio, Spain

    Eneko Osaba Icedo

  5. Lille University of Science and Technology, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Philippe Mathieu

  6. Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland

    Patrycja Hoffa-DÄ…browska

  7. Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Elena del Val

  8. Faculté des Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada

    Sylvain Giroux

  9. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Antonio J.M. Castro

  10. Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Nayat Sánchez-Pi

  11. Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Vicente Julián

  12. Informatica e Estatistica, Universidade Federal de Santa Catar, Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil

    Ricardo Azambuja Silveira

  13. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles, Madrid, Spain

    Alberto Fernández

  14. ICB, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Rainer Unland

  15. Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Rubén Fuentes-Fernández

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Medeiros, L., Bosse, T. (2018). Using Crowdsourcing for the Development of Online Emotional Support Agents. In: Bajo, J., et al. Highlights of Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complexity: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 887. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94779-2_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94779-2_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94778-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94779-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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