  It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts
and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease
with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step
in the right direction. The conversational agent must therefore be empathetic
and able to conduct free-flowing conversations. To this effect, we present an
approach for creating a generative empathetic open-domain chatbot that can be
used for mental health applications. We leverage large scale pre-training and
empathetic conversational data to make the responses more empathetic in nature
and a multi-turn dialogue arrangement to maintain context. Our models achieve
state-of-the-art results on the Empathetic Dialogues test set.
