PALbot+: An Empathetic Dialogue System for the Marginalized Populations in Korea with AI Safety Features
Keywords: Marginalized Populations, Mental Well-Being, Empathetic Chatbot, Emotional Support, Korean Language
TL;DR: PALbot+ empathize with you in a safe way
Abstract: The sharp rise in marginalized populations in South Korea, coupled with a severe shortage of mental health professionals and high costs impeding adequate support, urgently calls for alternative solutions providing immediate care. We introduce **PALbot+**, an AI-driven dialogue system designed to provide emotional support to marginalized individuals in South Korea, while refraining from generating inappropriate responses when presented with _dangerous_ utterances from the user. We augment a large-scale data in Korean language to train small-sized large language models (sLLMs) and a set of out-of-bound classifiers, designed to generate culturally relevant, contextually sensitive responses. Evaluation metrics show that PALbot+ outperforms the vanilla model, indicating an enhanced ability to produce a rich variety of expressions attending to different situations of the users.
Archival: Non-archival Track
Participation: In-person
Presenter: Suyeon Lee
Submission Number: 15
Loading