Meet the DBpedia Chatbot

This year’s GSoC is slowly coming to an end with final evaluations already being submitted. In order to bridge the waiting time until final results are published, we like to draw your attention to a former project and great tool that was developed during last years’ GSoC.

Meet the DBpedia Chatbot. 

DBpedia Chatbot is a conversational Chatbot for DBpedia which is accessible through the following platforms:

1. A Web Interface
2. Slack
3. Facebook Messenger

Main Purpose

The bot is capable of responding to users in the form of simple short text messages or through more elaborate interactive messages. Users can communicate or respond to the bot through text and also through interactions (such as clicking on buttons/links). There are 4 main purposes for the bot. They are:

1. Answering factual questions
2. Answering questions related to DBpedia
3. Expose the research work being done in DBpedia as product features
4. Casual conversation/banter

Question Types

The bot tries to answer text-based questions of the following types:

Natural Language Questions

1. Give me the capital of Germany
2. Who is Obama?

Location Information

1. Where is the Eiffel Tower?
2. Where is France’s capital?

Service Checks

Users can ask the bot to check if vital DBpedia services are operational.

1. Is DBpedia down?
2. Is lookup online?

Language Chapters

Users can ask basic information about specific DBpedia local chapters.

1. DBpedia Arabic
2. German DBpedia

Templates

These are predominantly questions related to DBpedia for which the bot provides predefined templatized answers. Some examples include:

1. What is DBpedia?
2. How can I contribute?
3. Where can I find the mapping tool?

Banter

Messages which are casual in nature fall under this category. For example:

1. Hi
2. What is your name?