# Nora: The Well-Being Coach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00410 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00410/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00524/) (2017)
- [MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12005/) (2020)
- [MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07687/) (2019)
- [XPersona: Evaluating Multilingual Personalized Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07568/) (2020)
- [Plug-and-Play Conversational Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04344/) (2020)
- [Attention-Based LSTM for Psychological Stress Detection from Spoken Language Using Distant Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12307/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02325/) (2021)
- [CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information-Seeking Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03530/) (2021)
- [Cross-Lingual Cross-Age Group Adaptation for Low-Resource Elderly Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14517/) (2023)
- [Empathetic Response in Audio-Visual Conversations Using Emotion Preference Optimization and MambaCompressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17572/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The current pandemic has forced people globally to remain in isolation and practice social distancing, which creates the need for a system to combat the resulting loneliness and negative emotions. In this paper we propose Nora, a virtual coaching platform designed to utilize natural language understanding in its dialogue system and suggest other recommendations based on user interactions. It is intended to provide assistance and companionship to people undergoing self-quarantine or work-from-home routines. Nora helps users gauge their well-being by detecting and recording the user's emotion, sentiment, and stress. Nora also recommends various workout, meditation, or yoga exercises to users in support of developing a healthy daily routine. In addition, we provide a social community inside Nora, where users can connect and share their experiences with others undergoing a similar isolation procedure. Nora can be accessed from anywhere via a web link and has support for both English and Mandarin.