“Client-centered counseling, in which individuals are prompted to talk about their behavior, is the standard treatment for Alcohol misuse. However, open-ended conversations with virtual agent counselor raise potential safety concerns if the agent misunderstands and provides erroneous advice. … We present a hybrid dialog system that uses a machine-learning model to generate responses to individual client speech combined with a rule-based approach to transition through structured counseling sessions.”

Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents.