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A Next Generation Chatbot-Framework for the Public Administration

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Innovations for Community Services (I4CS 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 863))

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Abstract

With the growing importance of dialog system and personal assistance systems (e.g. Google Now or Amazon Alexa) chatbots arrive more and more in the focus of interest. Current chatbots are typically tailored for specific scenarios and rather simple questions and commands. These systems cannot readily handle application domains characterized by a large number of relevant facts and complex services (e.g., offered by the public administration).

In this work, we present a chatbot framework tailored specifically to the needs of public administrations able to provide answers for all types of questions related to offered services and offices. The challenges in this scenario are the large number of relevant services, the complexity of administrative services, the context-dependent relevance of user questions, the differences in expert-language and user-language as well as the necessity of providing highly reliable answers for all questions.

We present the developed framework and discuss our experiences obtained while running the chatbot publicly with real users. The results show that our system efficiently provides relevant answers to the user questions. We explain how our system extends existing approaches and discuss the experiences with the live system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.gk-leika.de/.

  2. 2.

    https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lex/latest/dg/what-is.html.

  3. 3.

    https://dialogflow.com/.

  4. 4.

    https://grails.org/.

  5. 5.

    http://service.berlin.de.

  6. 6.

    http://egovernment-wettbewerb.de/gewinner/gewinner-2017.html.

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Acknowledgment

We thank the ITDZ Berlin for supporting the development and the optimization of the chatbot framework.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agent Technologies in Business Applications and Telecommunication Group (AOT), Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Andreas Lommatzsch

Authors
  1. Andreas Lommatzsch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Lommatzsch .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Žilina, Žilina, Slovakia

    Michal Hodoň

  2. Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Deutsche Telekom AG, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

    Gerald Eichler

  3. EAH Jena, Jena, Germany

    Christian Erfurth

  4. University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany

    Günter Fahrnberger

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Lommatzsch, A. (2018). A Next Generation Chatbot-Framework for the Public Administration. In: Hodoň, M., Eichler, G., Erfurth, C., Fahrnberger, G. (eds) Innovations for Community Services. I4CS 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 863. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93408-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93408-2_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93407-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93408-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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