Artificial intelligence is trying their hand at the role of online psychologist

A Japanese tech company has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts.

NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo web portal and search engine, created a system called Oshi-el to answer people’s relationship questions, like a virtual agony aunt. The researchers chose to focus on this genre of query as “non-factoid” questions are difficult for AI to address.

“Most chatbots today are only able to give you very short answers, and mainly just for factual questions,” says Makoto Nakatsuji at NTT Resonant. “Questions about love, especially in Japan, can often be a page long and complicated. They include a lot of context like family or school, which makes it hard to generate long and satisfying answers.” 

Nakatsuji and his team trained their algorithm using almost 190,000 questions and 770,000 answers from the company’s Oshiete goo forum. Based on this data, they came up with a generic structure for answers that includes a sentence showing sympathy, a suggested solution to the problem, an additional comment and a note of encouragement.

The Oshi-el AI then selects and combines appropriate sentences to use from a database based on the words used in the question. To combat the ambiguous nature of certain words – “relationship”, for example, could refer to a romantic situation or a business partnership – they use the category or title of each question to give the AI more context.

dailytechinfo.org