Google Summer of Code - SEMS mentors a project on a new DBpedia chatbot

23 August 2021, by Ricardo Usbeck

Photo: Google

From June 7, 2021, to August 23, 2021, Google supported several open-source projects through their Google Summer of Code program (GSoC). This year, SEMS supported a student extending the functionality of the current DBpedia chatbot by integrating the ecosystem of the Qanary framework including its plug-and-play components, and moved to Google DialogFlow.

The GSoC project was carried out by Jayesh Desai. He is currently doing his BTech in Computer Science at Ganpat University, India.  

The 2018 DBpedia chatbot [1] which you can find here https://chat.dbpedia.org/, was based on script-based chat languages as well as a fixed set of modules and thus functionality. 

The new chatbot for the DBpedia association provides access to a self-configurable Question Answering (QA) system. The chatbot is encapsulating the functionality of the Qanary framework including its plug-and-play components (cf. the list of available components). This project is dedicated to enabling regular users and researchers to define their own QA system by combining components just by interacting with the provided chatbot. Hence, no technical skills are required to create and test a new QA system.

The project is supervised and supported by Prof. Dr. Andreas Both and Aleksandr Perevalov as main mentors as well as Ram G Athreya and  SEMS' Prof. Dr. Ricardo Usbeck as co-mentors.

Our repository, https://github.com/dbpedia/chatbot-ng, provides the implementation of the chatbot. Originally it was proposed in the DBpedia forum: 'Modular DBpedia Chatbot'. Please find more information in the blog of the project.

A demo can be found here https://webengineering.ins.hs-anhalt.de/dbpediabot/ 

References:
[1] Athreya, Ram G., Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, and Ricardo Usbeck. "Enhancing Community Interactions with Data-Driven Chatbots--The DBpedia Chatbot." Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018. 2018.