Emotion-Aware Chatbot with Cultural Adaptation for Mitigating Work-Related Stress

The accessibility to affordable and yet effective mental health support is limited due to various barriers. Given the proliferation of technology, chatbots for mental health support has been widely used. Being mindful of the users' cultural background and the ability to respond with empathy are perceived as important factors that contribute to the usability and effective communication with chatbots. Nonetheless, cultural adaptation and emotional sensitivity in mental health chatbots are not thoroughly investigated. Hence, this work aims to design and implement an emotion-aware chatbot which incorporates cultural-adaptation that could provide effective Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) interventions to Malaysian community. The emotion detection model was developed using BERT and achieved an accuracy of 0.89. For cultural adaptation, besides localised contents, Google Cloud Translation API was used as the machine translation model between Malay to English. A user study was then carried out to assess the effectiveness of emotion sensitivity and cultural adaptation in CBT-based mental health support. The ablation study shows that CBT, cultural adaptation and emotional sensitivity have positive impact on the effectiveness and usability of mental health chatbots.