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Implementation of an inquisitive chatbot for database supported knowledge bases

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Abstract

Chatbot is a piece of software that responds to natural language input and attempts to hold a conversation in a way that imitates a real person. Some chatbots are used for entertainment purposes, while others for business and commercial purposes. Chatbots are getting a lot of attention from business community right now as they can save costs in customer service centers and can handle multiple clients at a time. Successful implementation of a chatbot calls for correct analysis of user’s query by the bot and the formation of the correct response that should be given to the user. In many scenarios the information available from the user’s query is inadequate to provide the answer. In such contexts, the chatbot needs to be inquisitive so that it will be more interactive and can mimic a more natural human interaction. This paper reports the implementation of an inquisitive chatbot, which finds the missing data in query and probes the questions to users to collect data that are required to answer the query. Through this implementation, the level of interactivity between the user and the chatbot is improved.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Department of Computer Applications, Cochin University of Science and Technology, for extending all the facilities for carrying out this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Applications, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi, 682 022, India

    S Reshmi & Kannan Balakrishnan

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  1. S Reshmi
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  2. Kannan Balakrishnan
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Correspondence to S Reshmi.

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Reshmi, S., Balakrishnan, K. Implementation of an inquisitive chatbot for database supported knowledge bases. Sādhanā 41, 1173–1178 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-016-0544-1

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