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The Chatbots Lab hosts and is involved in multiple internal and cooperation projects. This is the short list of the most recent projects.

SafeTraveller

The artificial conversational assistant SafeTraveller was created as a Bachelor student project in 2021. In the context of ever-changing COVID-19 regulations, the idea behind the project is to facilitate access to travel-related rules for people living in regions where cross-border traffic is essential. The current implementation covers travel regulations for the Benelux and the Greater Region countries and informs users in English.

The assistant is implemented using RASA and works in Facebook Messenger. The prototype was created considering design recommendations for chatbot usability. A heuristic-based evaluation of the user experience of the prototype showed that the assistant outperforms the results of its colleagues in the eHealth sector on average.

Read here the paper “SafeTraveller – A conversational assistant for BeNeLux travellers” published at BNAIC/BENELEARN conference 2021.

Conversation Analysis and Conversational Interfaces

Despite all difficulties in the beginning, a lot of research effort has been invested to bring various insights gained from Conversation analysis (CA) into Dialogue Processing. Several attempts have been made to involve CA in dialogue-based human-machine interaction. In this internal cross-faculty collaboration project we explore further involvement of CA methods in all sorts of conversational interfaces and chatbots. Partner: Béatrice Arend (University of Luxembourg, Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences).

Artificial Conversation Companion

Practicing foreign language conversation with a machine may have multiple advantages: a machine does not judge, a machine is always available and accessible from everywhere. In this project we focus on language understanding and generation for German as a communication language for non-native speakers.

Read the whole story here: https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783030155032

SQL QuizBot: Conversational Interfaces for E-Assessment

In this proof-of concept project we investigate the opportunities and limitations of using conversational interfaces for e-assessment. We are working on connecting the open-source assessment software TAO with various instant messengers. This project is a continuation of the master thesis project by Bharathi Vijayakumar who successfully finished her thesis in September 2018.

Read here the paper “Quizbot: Exploring Formative Feedback with Conversational Interfaces” published at the TEA conference 2018.

Robo-Chat: Using Conversational Interfaces for Communication with Complex Systems

In this internal research cooperation between the ACC Lab and SnT, we focus on using conversational interfaces for communication with complex technical systems in order to foster the explainability of their decisions, facilitation of the maintenance and a better understanding of human needs for such interfaces. We chose a data-driven approach for building a rule-based system, for which we analyse a dataset from Wizard-of-Oz experiments. This research is grounded in Conversation Analysis which allows dialogue modelling from small datasets and small number of examples. Cooperation partner: Nico Hochgeschwender (SnT).

Read here the paper “Conversational Interfaces for Explainable AI: A Human-Centered Approach” presented at the EXTRAAMAS workshop 2019.