Presenting our Chatbot Research at the LWDA Conference 2019 in Berlin

Author: Andreas Lommatzsch

The 2019 LWDA conference has been held in Berlin from September 30th to October 2nd, 2019. This year’s venues have been the Smart Data Forum (next to the TU Berlin) in and the Berlin School of Library and Information Science (next to the main building of the Humboldt-University Berlin). The conference is organized by the German Computer Science Society (GI). The core topics of the conference are Knowledge Discovery and Machine Learning; Databases, and Information Retrieval.

From the many interesting presentations I would like to highlight the keynote "Beyond research data infrastructures: exploiting artificial & crowd intelligence towards building research knowledge graphs" by Stefan Dietze. The talk underlined the importance of datasets and the aggregation of datasets for research. Challenges are ambiguity and missing meta-data for the available datasets. Converting crawled data into knowledge graphs by applying semantic and ML methods (e.g. NER, NED, Sentiment Detection) provides the basis for new research fields, especially related to social science. I liked the talk due to the fact that we made similar observation in our research projects (e.g. [1] and [2]). Created datasets are provided on our dataset web page.

CC IRML presented current research in the domain of chatbot systems at the conference. Our contribution "An Information Retrieval-based Approach for Building Intuitive Chatbots for Large Knowledge Bases" reports the experiences running the Virtual Assistant "Bobbi". Bobbi is a chatbot providing information related to services and locations of the Berlin Administration. The paper discusses how to build chatbots without training data (cold-start problem) and explains how to efficiently handle the wide variety of observed user intentions. The research uses data which we have collected in the live system deployed on the official website of the city of Berlin (service.berlin.de). We presented the results in a 30 minutes talk. Besides, we participated in the poster session to discuss more directly with attendees.