ABLE: Personalized Disability Support with Politeness and Empathy Integration

In today's dynamic world, providing inclusive and personalized support for individuals with physical disabilities is imperative. With diverse needs and preferences, tailored assistance according to user personas is crucial. In this paper, we introduce ABLE (Adaptive, Bespoke, Listen and Empathetic), a Conversational Support System for Physical Disabilities. By tracking user personas, including gender, age, and personality traits based on the OCEAN model, ABLE ensures that support interactions are uniquely tailored to each user's characteristics and preferences. Moreover, integrating politeness and empathy levels in responses enhances user satisfaction and engagement, fostering a supportive and respectful environment. The development of ABLE involves compiling a comprehensive conversational dataset enriched with user profile annotations. Leveraging reinforcement learning techniques and diverse reward mechanisms, ABLE trains a model to generate responses aligned with individual user profiles while maintaining appropriate levels of politeness and empathy. Based on rigorous empirical analysis encompassing automatic and human evaluation metrics based on personaconsistency, politeness accuracy, empathy accuracy, perplexity, and conversation coherence, the efficacy of ABLE is assessed. Our findings underscore ABLE's success in delivering tailored support to individuals grappling with physical disabilities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first attempt towards building a user's persona-oriented physical disability support system 1 .