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Talking in Italian About AI with a Chatbot: A Prototype of a Question-Answering Agent

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Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 2020 (IDEAL 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12490))

Abstract

Talking with chatbots and question answering interfaces is nowadays common to most people using some kind of digital device. Artificial intelligence-based solutions to create chatbots are available on the market and are provided by all the big players like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Chatbots can differ for the type of corpus they rely upon, the type of questions they are suited for, the algorithms, and the ability to learn and expand their knowledge base. Moreover they differ for the language, with English chatbots being on average those best performing. In this paper we present ConversIAmo, a chatbot prototype designed to answer questions in Italian about introductory concepts on Artificial Intelligence. The natural language processing pipeline is built upon the IBM Watson suite and implements further modules for improving the answer selection and ordering, and to expand the knowledge base. Results are encouraging, especially with regard to the ordering of the correct answers. The paper describes the question answering dataset, the first in this domain, and outlines the dialog flow and the answering process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/Chln94/ConversIAmo.

  2. 2.

    Available on https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52419.

  3. 3.

    Available on http://www.msmarco.org/.

  4. 4.

    Available on https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/.

  5. 5.

    Available on https://github.com/crux82/squad-it.

  6. 6.

    Before using the corpus, please check copyright permissions of resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Genoa DIBRIS, Viale F. Causa 13, 16145, Genoa, Italy

    Chiara Leoni, Mauro Coccoli, Ilaria Torre & Gianni Vercelli

Authors
  1. Chiara Leoni
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  2. Mauro Coccoli
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  3. Ilaria Torre
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  4. Gianni Vercelli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gianni Vercelli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Cesar Analide

  2. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Paulo Novais

  3. Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    David Camacho

  4. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Hujun Yin

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Leoni, C., Coccoli, M., Torre, I., Vercelli, G. (2020). Talking in Italian About AI with a Chatbot: A Prototype of a Question-Answering Agent. In: Analide, C., Novais, P., Camacho, D., Yin, H. (eds) Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 2020. IDEAL 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12490. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62365-4_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62365-4_34

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