Populating the knowledge base of a conversational agent

BACKGROUND This article presents the modeling and development of a Knowledge Based System, supported by the use of a virtual conversational agent called Dóris. Using natural language processing resources, Dóris collects the clinical data of patients in care in the context of urgency and hospital emergency. OBJECTIVE The main objective is to validate the use of virtual conversational agents to properly and accurately collect the data necessary to perform the evaluation flowcharts used to classify the degree of urgency of patients and determine the priority for medical care. METHODS The agent's knowledge base was modeled using the rules provided for in the evaluation flowcharts comprised by the Manchester Triage System. It also allows the establishment of a simple, objective and complete communication, through dialogues to assess signs and symptoms that obey the criteria established by a standardized, validated and internationally recognized system. RESULTS Thus, in addition to verifying the applicability of Artificial Intelligence techniques in a complex domain of health care, a tool is presented that helps not only in the perspective of improving organizational processes, but also in improving human relationships, bringing professionals and patients closer. The system's knowledge base was modeled on the IBM Watson platform. CONCLUSIONS The results obtained from simulations carried out by the human specialist allowed us to verify that a knowledge-based system supported by a virtual conversational agent is feasible for the domain of risk classification and priority determination of medical care for patients in the context of emergency care and hospital emergency.

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Developing Amaia: A Conversational Agent for Helping Portuguese Entrepreneurs—An Extensive Exploration of Question-Matching Approaches for Portuguese

Information ◽

10.3390/info11090428 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (9) ◽

pp. 428

Author(s):

José Santos ◽

Luís Duarte ◽

João Ferreira ◽

Ana Alves ◽

Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

Keyword(s):

Information Retrieval ◽

Knowledge Base ◽

Word Embeddings ◽

Conversational Agent ◽

Minimal Impact ◽

Semantic Textual Similarity

This paper describes how we tackled the development of Amaia, a conversational agent for Portuguese entrepreneurs. After introducing the domain corpus used as Amaia’s Knowledge Base (KB), we make an extensive comparison of approaches for automatically matching user requests with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) in the KB, covering Information Retrieval (IR), approaches based on static and contextual word embeddings, and a model of Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) trained for Portuguese, which achieved the best performance. We further describe how we decreased the model’s complexity and improved scalability, with minimal impact on performance. In the end, Amaia combines an IR library and an STS model with reduced features. Towards a more human-like behavior, Amaia can also answer out-of-domain questions, based on a second corpus integrated in the KB. Such interactions are identified with a text classifier, also described in the paper.

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