# CASS: Towards Building a Social-Support Chatbot for Online Health Community

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.01583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 135 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Human-AI Collaboration in Data Science: Exploring Data Scientists' Perceptions of Automated AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02309/) (2019)
- [OpenNMT: Neural Machine Translation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11462/) (2018)
- [Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08428/) (2017)
- [Understanding Chatbot-mediated Task Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03109/) (2018)
- [Touch Your Heart: A Tone-aware Chatbot for Customer Care on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02952/) (2018)
- [Designing Fair AI for Managing Employees in Organizations: A Review, Critique, and Design Agenda](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09054/) (2020)
- [Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action Using Online Bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06026/) (2015)
- [Dissecting a Social Botnet: Growth, Content and Influence in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03627/) (2016)
- [Not at Home on the Range: Peer Production and the Urban/Rural Divide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10954/) (2019)
- [DeepProbe: Information Directed Sequence Understanding and Chatbot Design via Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05470/) (2017)
- [The Lives of Bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09590/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [D2S: Document-to-Slide Generation Via Query-Based Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03664/) (2021)
- [CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08845/) (2022)
- [An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17017/) (2023)
- [CAB: Empathetic Dialogue Generation with Cognition, Affection and Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01935/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Emotion-Semantic Correlations for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17437/) (2024)
- [E-CORE: Emotion Correlation Enhanced Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15016/) (2023)
- [Development and Evaluation of Three Chatbots for Postpartum Mood and Anxiety Disorders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07407/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chatbots systems, despite their popularity in today's HCI and CSCW research, fall short for one of the two reasons: 1) many of the systems use a rule-based dialog flow, thus they can only respond to a limited number of pre-defined inputs with pre-scripted responses; or 2) they are designed with a focus on single-user scenarios, thus it is unclear how these systems may affect other users or the community. In this paper, we develop a generalizable chatbot architecture (CASS) to provide social support for community members in an online health community. The CASS architecture is based on advanced neural network algorithms, thus it can handle new inputs from users and generate a variety of responses to them. CASS is also generalizable as it can be easily migrate to other online communities. With a follow-up field experiment, CASS is proven useful in supporting individual members who seek emotional support. Our work also contributes to fill the research gap on how a chatbot may influence the whole community's engagement.