ChatWise: A Strategy-Guided Chatbot for Enhancing Cognitive Support in Older Adults

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5924 Authors

Abstract: Cognitive health in older adults presents a growing challenge. Although conversational interventions show feasibility in improving cognitive wellness, human caregiver resources remain overloaded. AI-based chatbots have shown promise, yet existing work is often limited to implicit strategies or heavily depends on training and label resources. In response, we propose a strategy-guided AI chatbot named ChatWise that follows a dual-level conversation reasoning framework. It integrates macro-level strategy planning and micro-level utterance generation to enable engaging, multi-turn dialogue tailored to older adults. Empirical results show that ChatWise closely aligns with professional human caregiver behaviors in offline evaluation using real clinic data, and achieves positive user cognitive and emotional responses in interactive simulations with digital twins, which significantly outperforms AI baselines that follow implicit conversation generation.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Research Area Keywords: conversational modeling

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5924