An Automated Crisis Online Dispatcher

An experimental automated dialogue system that plays the role of a crisis hotline dispatcher is currently developed. Besides controlling the communication flow, this system is able to retrieve information about crisis situations from user’s input. It offers a natural user interaction by the ability to perceive and respond to human emotions. The system has an emotion recognizer that is able to recognize the emotional loading from user’s linguistic content. The recognizer uses a database that contains selected keywords on a 2D “arousal” and “valence” scale. The output of the system provides not only the information about the user’s emotional state but also an indication of the urgency of his/her information regarding to crisis. The dialogue system is able to start a user friendly dialogue, taking care of the content, context and emotional loading of user’s utterances.