Modeling Empathy in Embodied Conversational Agents: Extended Abstract

This paper is intended to outline the PhD research that is aimed to model empathy in embodied conversational systems. Our goal is to determine the requirements for implementation of an empathic interactive agent and develop evaluation methods that is aligned with the empathy research from various fields. The thesis is composed of three scientific contributions: (i) developing a computational model of empathy, (ii) implementation of the model in embodied conversational agents and (iii) enhance the understanding of empathy in interaction by generating data and build evaluation tools. The paper will give results for the contribution (i) and preliminary results for contribution (ii). Moreover, we will present the future plan for contribution (ii) and (iii).