The advent of Large Language Models has accelerated interest in empathetic conversational agents. Despite a surge in empirical research, artificial empathy remains deeply fragmented, often serving as a catch-all term for diverse interactional phenomena. Addressing this conceptual gap, we systematically review 89 empirical studies to map how human-machine empathy is operationalized. Our synthesis reveals that empathy is highly situated and driven by functional goals, like health and well-being, transactional service, social interaction, and learning support. Within these contexts, we classify affective responsiveness by its directional flow, detailing how agents project, elicit, or mediate empathy. We structure the literature into a cohesive framework spanning linguistic, paralinguistic, identity, and architectural strategies. Furthermore, our methodological evaluation reveals a reliance on adapted clinical metrics, a scarcity of longitudinal studies, and a disproportionate focus on text-based over voice-based interfaces. Ultimately, this review equips researchers and practitioners with an actionable foundation for designing, measuring, and implementing contextually appropriate and empathetic agents.
Supriya Khadka, Smit Desai· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are rapidly advancing, moving from single-task assistants to powerful and engaging artificial agents. As CUIs become embedded in daily life, the implications for users interacting with such systems demand closer scrutiny. While some issues are immediately identifiable (e.g. privacy risks, misinformation, AI hallucinations), others may only become visible after longer periods of use, including over-reliance, erosion of human agency, or the normalization of biased or exclusionary language. This workshop aims to gather a multidisciplinary community to reflect on pressing challenges and uncertainties and explore risk analysis and mitigation strategies in CUI design and deployment. Through presentations, discussions, and collaborative design activities, participants will examine immediate and longitudinal risks and share empirical insights. The activities will support developing interdisciplinary frameworks to understand and handle unintended consequences of CUIs. The workshop seeks to build an international network of scholars and practitioners to promote responsible and human-centred conversational AI.
Manveer Kalirai, C. Wei, Thomas Essmeyer et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Calibrated personality vectors transform an opaque safety phenomenon into a human-legible diagnostic profile by extracting activation directions for character traits from a single binary contrast, which can separate or steer behavior without establishing a calibrated scale.