Accessing an Information System by Chatting

In this paper, we describe a new way to access information by “chatting” to an information source. This involves a chatbot, a program that emulates human conversation; the chatbot must be trainable with a text, to accept input and match it against the text to generate replies in the conversation. We have developed a Machine Learning approach to retrain the ALICE chatbot with a transcript of human dialogue, and used this to develop a range of chatbots conversing in different styles and languages. We adapted this chatbot-training program to the Qur’an, to allow users to learn from the Qur’an in a conversational information-access style. The process and results are illustrated in this paper.