Designing service-oriented chatbot systems using a construction grammar-driven natural language generation system

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an efficient and useful system. In this thesis we investigate current and past methods in this research area and place particular emphasis on Construction Grammar and its computational implementation. Our research shows that users have strong emotive reactions to how these systems behave, so we also investigate the human computer interaction component. We present three systems (KIA, John and KIA2), and carry out extensive user tests on all of them, as well as comparative tests. KIA is built using exisitng methods, John is built with the user in mind and KIA2 is built using the construction grammar method. We found that the construction grammar approach performs well in service oriented chatbots systems, and that users preferred it over other systems.