Abstract
Chatbot (and voicebot) applications are increasingly adopted in various domains such as e-commerce or customer services as a direct communication channel between companies and end-users. Multiple frameworks have been developed to ease their definition and deployment. While these frameworks are efficient to design simple chatbot applications, they still require advanced technical knowledge to define complex interactions and are difficult to evolve along with the company needs (e.g. it is typically impossible to change the NL engine provider). In addition, the deployment of a chatbot application usually requires a deep understanding of the targeted platforms, especially back-end connections, increasing the development and maintenance costs. In this paper, we introduce the Xatkit framework. Xatkit tackles these issues by providing a set of Domain Specific Languages to define chatbots (and voicebots and bots in general) in a platform-independent way. Xatkit also comes with a runtime engine that automatically deploys the chatbot application and manages the defined conversation logic over the platforms of choice. Xatkit's modular architecture facilitates the separate evolution of any of its components. Xatkit is open source and fully available online.
Highlights
Instant messaging platforms have been widely adopted as one of the main technologies to communicate and exchange information [1], [2]
Existing reports highlight the large-scale usage of chatbots in social media [7], and emphasize that chatbot design will become a key ability in IT hires in the near future [8]
We introduce Xatkit, a novel model-based chatbot development framework that aims to address this question using Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques: domainspecific languages, platform independent bot definitions, and runtime interpretation
Summary
Instant messaging platforms have been widely adopted as one of the main technologies to communicate and exchange information [1], [2]. 2 billion dollars by 2024, growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 29.7%.2 This widespread interest and demand for chatbot applications has emphasized the need to be able to quickly build complex chatbot applications supporting AI-based natural language processing [9] in order to be able to fluently chat with the user. Chatbot development platforms have mainly addressed the first challenge, typically by relying on external intent recognition providers, which are natural language (NL) processing frameworks providing user-friendly interfaces to define conversation assets. This work aims to tackle all these issues by raising the level of abstraction at what chatbots are defined To this purpose, we introduce Xatkit, a novel model-based chatbot development framework that aims to address this question using Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques: domainspecific languages, platform independent bot definitions, and runtime interpretation.
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