Inducing Empathy in Conversations

Title Of the Talk: “Inducing Empathy in Conversations”
Speakers: Dr. Mauajama Firdaus from the Department of CSE, University of Alberta, Canada
Host Faculty: Dr.Rameshwar Pratap
Date &Time: December 12 (Tuesday) from 10:00-11:00 AM

Abstract: An essential task in the field of artificial intelligence is to allow computers to interact with people through natural language. Dialogue systems have emerged to be an important application assisting humans in their everyday lives. For smooth social interaction, empathy plays a crucial role in human psychological processes. Empathy-related response entails caring and considerate concerns about other persons. Humans are born with core affect neural circuitry, and they progressively acquire the ability to understand others’ emotional states and respond empathically. Empathy encourages pro-social conduct and strengthens the sense of social bonding.

In this talk, I will present my work on politeness that embalms interactions, putting the parties in conversation at ease. I will start by introducing the task of politeness followed by the description of the deep learning framework for inducing courteous behavior in customer care responses. Towards empathetic conversational AI, I will describe my work on introducing the task of multiple emotions with different intensities controlled response generation. I will conclude with a discussion on the future directions of this line of work.

Speaker Profile: Mauajama Firdaus presently serves as a Postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, Canada. She earned her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India, in 2021. Her primary research focus lies within the domains of Natural Language Processing and Dialogue Generation. Over the past seven years, she has dedicated her research efforts to Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Extraction, and Machine Learning (ML), yielding substantial contributions in these fields. Dr. Firdaus has authored numerous papers presented at esteemed conferences such as AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, NAACL, and published in distinguished journals including Expert Systems with Applications, Knowledge-based Systems, ACM Transactions, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, among others. Notably, she has delivered a tutorial at IJCAI, a premier conference, specifically on the topic of empathetic dialogue systems.

Date:
December 12 (Tuesday) from 10:00-11:00 AM