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A Fuzzy Reasoning Process for Conversational Agents in Cognitive Cities

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Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 363))

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Abstract

Facing the challenges in a city that is to be understood as a complex construct, this article presents a solution approach for the further development of existing conversational agents, which should be used particularly in cities, for instance, as a source of information. The proposed framework consists of a fuzzy analogical reasoning process (based on structure-mapping theory) and a network-like memory (i.e., fuzzy cognitive maps stored in graph databases) as additions to the general architecture of a chatbot. Thus, it represents a concept of a global fuzzy reasoning process, which allows conversational agents to emulate human information processing by using cognitive computing (consisting of soft computing methods and cognition and learning theories). The framework is already in the third iteration of its development. Three experiments were conducted to examine the stability of the theoretical foundation as well as the potential of the framework.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE&list=RDYgYSv2KSyWg&index=4.

  2. 2.

    cf. https://www.ibm.com/watson.

  3. 3.

    cf. https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar.

  4. 4.

    cf. https://www.apple.com/ios/siri.

  5. 5.

    cf. https://developer.amazon.com/alexa.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants and volunteers of both experiments as well as the experts for their valuable input.

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Correspondence to Sara D’Onofrio .

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D’Onofrio, S., Müller, S.M., Portmann, E. (2019). A Fuzzy Reasoning Process for Conversational Agents in Cognitive Cities. In: Hammoudi, S., Śmiałek, M., Camp, O., Filipe, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 363. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26169-6_6

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