Chatbot

About: Chatbot is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2415 publications have been published within this topic receiving 24372 citations. The topic is also known as: IM bot & AI chatbot.

Text Messaging-Based Medical Diagnosis Using Natural Language Processing and Fuzzy Logic

Abstract: The use of natural language processing (NLP) methods and their application to developing conversational systems for health diagnosis increases patients’ access to medical knowledge. In this study, a chatbot service was developed for the Covenant University Doctor (CUDoctor) telehealth system based on fuzzy logic rules and fuzzy inference. The service focuses on assessing the symptoms of tropical diseases in Nigeria. Telegram Bot Application Programming Interface (API) was used to create the interconnection between the chatbot and the system, while Twilio API was used for interconnectivity between the system and a short messaging service (SMS) subscriber. The service uses the knowledge base consisting of known facts on diseases and symptoms acquired from medical ontologies. A fuzzy support vector machine (SVM) is used to effectively predict the disease based on the symptoms inputted. The inputs of the users are recognized by NLP and are forwarded to the CUDoctor for decision support. Finally, a notification message displaying the end of the diagnosis process is sent to the user. The result is a medical diagnosis system which provides a personalized diagnosis utilizing self-input from users to effectively diagnose diseases. The usability of the developed system was evaluated using the system usability scale (SUS), yielding a mean SUS score of 80.4, which indicates the overall positive evaluation.

“I Am Here to Assist You Today”: The Role of Entity, Interactivity and Experiential Perceptions in Chatbot Persuasion

Abstract: Online users are increasingly exposed to chatbots as one form of AI-enabled media technologies, employed for persuasive purposes, e.g., making product/service recommendations. However, the persuasive potential of chatbots has not yet been fully explored. Using an online experiment (N = 242), we investigate the extent to which communicating with a stand-alone chatbot influences affective and behavioral responses compared to interactive Web sites. Several underlying mechanisms are studied, showing that enjoyment is the key mechanism explaining the positive effect of chatbots (vs. Web sites) on recommendation adherence and attitudes. Contrary to expectations, perceived anthropomorphism seems not to be particularly relevant in this comparison.

Service chatbots: A systematic review

Abstract: Chatbots or Conversational agents are the next significant technological leap in the field of conversational services, that is, enabling a device to communicate with a user upon receiving user requests in natural language. The device uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to respond to the user with automated responses. While this is a relatively new area of study, the application of this concept has increased substantially over the last few years. The technology is no longer limited to merely emulating human conversation but is also being increasingly used to answer questions, either in academic environments or in commercial uses, such as situations requiring assistants to seek reasons for customer dissatisfaction or recommending products and services. The primary purpose of this literature review is to identify and study the existing literature on cutting-edge technology in developing chatbots in terms of research trends, their components and techniques, datasets and domains used, as well as evaluation metrics most used between 2011 and 2020. Using the standard SLR guidelines designed by Kitchenham, this work adopts a systematic literature review approach and utilizes five prestigious scientific databases for identifying, extracting, and analyzing all relevant publications during the search. The related publications were filtered based on inclusion/exclusion criteria and quality assessment to obtain the final review paper. The results of the review indicate that the exploitation of deep learning and reinforcement learning architecture is the most used technique to understand users’ requests and to generate appropriate responses. Besides, we also found that the Twitter dataset (open domain) is the most popular dataset used for evaluation, followed by Airline Travel Information Systems (ATIS) (close domain) and Ubuntu Dialog Corpora (technical support) datasets. The SLR review also indicates that the open domain provided by the Twitter dataset, airline and technical support are the most common domains for chatbots. Moreover, the metrics utilized most often for evaluating chatbot performance (in descending order of popularity) were found to be accuracy, F1-Score, BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy), recall, human-evaluation, and precision.

Say Hello to Your New Automated Tutor – A Structured Literature Review on Pedagogical Conversational Agents

Abstract: In this paper, we present the current state of the art of using conversational agents for educational purposes. These so-called pedagogical conversational agents are a specialized type of e-learning and intelligent tutoring systems. The main difference to traditional e-learning and intelligent tutoring systems is that they interact with learners using natural language dialogs, e.g. in the form of chatbots. For the sake of our research project, we analyzed current trends in the research stream as well as research gaps. Our results show for instance that (1) there is a trend towards using mobile conversational agents in education, (2) a proper generalization of existing research results (e.g. design knowledge) is missing, and (3) there is a need for comprehensive in-depth evaluation studies and corresponding process models. Based on our results, we outline a research agenda for future research studies.

Sequence to Sequence Model Performance for Education Chatbot

Abstract: Chatbot for education has great potential to complement human educators and education administrators. For example, it can be around the clock tutor to answer and clarify any questions from students who may have missed class. A chatbot can be implemented either by ruled based or artificial intel-ligence based. However, unlike the ruled-based chatbots, artificial intelli-gence based chatbots can learn and become smarter overtime and is more scalable and has become the popular choice for chatbot researchers recently. Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model is one of the most commonly researched model to implement artificial intelli-gence chatbot and has shown great progress since its introduction in 2014. However, it is still in infancy and has not been applied widely in educational chatbot development. Introduced originally for neural machine translation, the Seq2Seq model has been adapted for conversation modelling including question-answering chatbots. However, in-depth research and analysis of op-timal settings of the various components of Seq2Seq model for natural an-swer generation problem is very limited. Additionally, there has been no ex-periments and analysis conducted to understand how Seq2Seq model handles variations is questions posed to it to generate correct answers. Our experi-ments add to the empirical evaluations on Seq2Seq literature and provides insights to these questions. Additionally, we provide insights on how a cu-rated dataset can be developed and questions designed to train and test the performance of a Seq2Seq based question-answer model.