Assessing and monitoring post-traumatic stress disorder through natural interaction with an adaptive dialogue system

We present an Adaptive Dialogue System, able to make conversation in natural language with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-suffering users, and guide the way that allows eliciting information about their disorder and progress of their treatment. As the conversation unfolds, the system gathers information enabling us to calculate a PTSD score and perform an initial screening of the users. We generate the system's response in real time and continuously monitor an estimate of the user's emotional state. If a user becomes frustrated, angry, sad, etc., we provide encouragement and observe any changes in the dialogue. The system will be trained with data from real and simulated interactions, using automatic virtual agents. Last, we present our plans for evaluation with PTSD-suffering and non-PTSD-suffering users.