M-Path: A Conversational System for the Empathic Virtual Agent

M-Path is an embodied conversational agent developed to achieve natural interaction using empathic behaviors. This paper is aimed to describe the details of the conversational management system within the M-Path framework that manages dialogue interaction with an emotional awareness. Our conversational system is equipped with a goal-directed narrative structure that adapts to the emotional reactions of the user using empathy mechanisms. We further show the implementation and a preliminary evaluation of our system in a consultation scenario, where our agent uses text-based dialogue interaction to conduct surveys.