A Preliminary Study on Empathy in Conversational Social Agents

There has been a rise in the last years of different types of agents that interact with humans, be it for educational or healthcare purposes, among others. In pursuit of making these agents better and more engaging, they are presenting more traits which we commonly associate with humans, such as affect or proactivity. Within these traits we can find empathy, the ability to relate to others and feel their emotions and struggles as our own. In this paper, we aim to explore the presence of empathy in agents, and how this has been implemented so far. We also want to observe if there is a unified approach to the definition and evaluation of empathy in agents, so as to proceed within a clear framework when implementing such systems in the future.