CuentosIE: can a chatbot about "tales with a message" help to teach emotional intelligence?

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Feb 29:10:e1866. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1866. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

In this article, we present CuentosIE (TalesEI: chatbot of tales with a message to develop Emotional Intelligence), an educational chatbot on emotions that also provides teachers and psychologists with a tool to monitor their students/patients through indicators and data compiled by CuentosIE. The use of "tales with a message" is justified by their simplicity and easy understanding, thanks to their moral or associated metaphors. The main contributions of CuentosIE are the selection, collection, and classification of a set of highly specialized tales, as well as the provision of tools (searching, reading comprehension, chatting, recommending, and classifying) that are useful for both educating users about emotions and monitoring their emotional development. The preliminary evaluation of the tool has obtained encouraging results, which provides an affirmative answer to the question posed in the title of the article.

Keywords: Chatbot; Emotion classifier; Emotional intelligence; Information retrieval; Natural language processing; Psychology.

Grants and funding

The research work conducted is part of the R&D projects “CORTEX: Conscious Text Generation” (PID2021-123956OB-I00), funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and the project “NL4DISMIS: Natural Language Technologies for dealing with dis- and misinformation with grant reference (CIPROM/2021/021)” funded by the Generalitat Valenciana. Furthermore, it has been funded by the BALLADEER project (PROMETEO/2021/088) from the Consellería Valenciana and by the AETHER-UA (PID2020-112540RB-C43) project from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.