An Empathic Agent that Alleviates Stress by Providing Support via Social Media

This paper describes the development of an ‘artificial friend’, i.e., an intelligent agent that provides support via text messages in social media in order to alleviate the stress that users experience as a result of everyday problems. The agent consists of three main components: 1) a module that processes text messages based on text mining and classifies them into categories of problems, 2) a module that selects appropriate support strategies based on a validated psychological model of emotion regulation, and 3) a module that generates appropriate responses based on the output of the first two modules. The application is able to interact with users via the social network Telegram.