DisBot: A Portuguese Disaster Support Dynamic Knowledge Chatbot

João Boné,Ricardo Ribeiro,Gonçalo Cadete,João C Ferreira

doi:10.3390/app10249082

Abstract

This paper presents DisBot, the first Portuguese speaking chatbot that uses social media retrieved knowledge to support citizens and first-responders in disaster scenarios, in order to improve community resilience and decision-making. It was developed and tested using Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), being progressively matured with field specialists through several design and development iterations. DisBot uses a state-of-the-art Dual Intent Entity Transformer (DIET) architecture to classify user intents, and makes use of several dialogue policies for managing user conversations, as well as storing relevant information to be used in further dialogue turns. To generate responses, it uses real-world safety knowledge, and infers a dynamic knowledge graph that is dynamically updated in real-time by a disaster-related knowledge extraction tool, presented in previous works. Through its development iterations, DisBot has been validated by field specialists, who have considered it to be a valuable asset in disaster management.

Highlights

Disaster management is a series of procedures intended to be implemented before, during and after disasters, in order to avoid or minimize their damage [1]
As previously mentioned in the description of the methodology, the demonstration and evaluation of the created artifact was held in three different meetings
DisBot was presented according to a demonstration scenario, questions and answers regarding its behavior, and a small hands-on, where evaluators could test or propose interactions with the artifact

Summary

Introduction

Disaster management is a series of procedures intended to be implemented before, during and after disasters, in order to avoid or minimize their damage [1]. It is becoming a wide and more spread out topic, as we have seen an increase in disaster occurrences, whether from extreme weather events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods, or from man-made disasters like most wildfires and terrorism. Language is the cornerstone of human communication and sentience, and conversation is the most basic and uniquely privileged domain of that cornerstone It is the first kind of language we know as children, and for the majority of us, it is the kind of language we most commonly nourish [4]

Methods

Results

Conclusion