Presenting our Chatbot Framework at the Conference of Innovative Internet Community Services

Author: Andreas Lommatzsch

The 18th edition of the International Conference on Innovative Internet Community Systems (I4CS) took place at the University of Zilina, Slovakia, 18-20 June 2018.
This year the conference focuses was on innovation methods for enterprises, methods for building the Internet of Things (IoT) as well as innovative applications.

I presented our chatbot framework optimized for answering questions related to public administrations’ services. In contrast to most existing frameworks, our approach provides detailed answers to several hundred services and helps users in a dialog to find all information relevant for a specific information need. The system combines several data sources (databases, geo information, ontologies, and synonyms) and uses several different natural language processing methods for detecting the user’s intension. In my talk, I presented our approach in detail and discussed our experiences operating the chatbot system live on the service web portal of the Berlin’s administration. Find more details in the conference paper.

The conference featured a multitude of exciting presentations. I would like to highlight the talk “Innovation Management Methods in the Aviation Industry” given by Karl-Heinz Lüke. The presentation discussed the results of a survey of external and in-house innovation methods giving profound insights into the aviation industry’s way of thinking.

The conference’s main social event was a hiking tour in the Mala Fatra with its magnificent gorges and beautiful hills. The tour has fostered discussing trends and experiences concerning current research projects in an inspiring landscape.

In 2019, the 19th edition of the I4CS conference will be held in Wolfsburg, Germany.