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Model-Driven Chatbot Development

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Conceptual Modeling (ER 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12400))

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Abstract

Chatbots are software services accessed via conversation in natural language. They are increasingly used to help in all kinds of procedures like booking flights, querying visa information or assigning tasks to developers. They can be embedded in webs and social networks, and be used from mobile devices without installing dedicated apps. While many frameworks and platforms have emerged for their development, identifying the most appropriate one for building a particular chatbot requires a high investment of time. Moreover, some of them are closed – resulting in customer lock-in – or require deep technical knowledge.

To tackle these issues, we propose a model-driven engineering approach to chatbot development. It comprises a neutral meta-model and a domain-specific language (DSL) for chatbot description; code generators and parsers for several chatbot platforms; and a platform recommender. Our approach supports forward and reverse engineering, and model-based analysis. We demonstrate its feasibility presenting a prototype tool and an evaluation based on migrating third party Dialogflow bots to Rasa.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.aiml.foundation/.

  2. 2.

    For brevity, Table 2 shows the number of languages supported, not the list of them.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/actions-on-google/dialogflow-number-genie-nodejs.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/dialogflow/dialogflow-java-client-v2/tree/master/samples/resources.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/Viber/apiai-nutrition-sample.

  6. 6.

    https://www.botium.ai/.

  7. 7.

    https://tortu.io/.

  8. 8.

    https://www.voiceflow.com/.

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Acknowledgments

Work funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (RTI2018-095255-B-I00) and the R&D programme of Madrid (P2018/TCS-4314).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Sara Pérez-Soler, Esther Guerra & Juan de Lara

Authors
  1. Sara Pérez-Soler
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  2. Esther Guerra
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  3. Juan de Lara
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sara Pérez-Soler .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Gillian Dobbie

  2. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Ulrich Frank

  3. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Gerti Kappel

  4. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Stephen W. Liddle

  5. University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria

    Heinrich C. Mayr

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Pérez-Soler, S., Guerra, E., de Lara, J. (2020). Model-Driven Chatbot Development. In: Dobbie, G., Frank, U., Kappel, G., Liddle, S.W., Mayr, H.C. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12400. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62522-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62522-1_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62521-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62522-1

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