The Enhanced Arabchat: An Arabic Conversational Agent

Hijjawi, M, Bandar, Z and Crockett, K (2016) The Enhanced Arabchat: An Arabic Conversational Agent. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 7. ISSN 2158-107X

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Abstract

The Enhanced ArabChat is a complement of the previous version of ArabChat. This paper details an enhancements development of a novel and practical Conversational Agent for the Arabic language called the “Enhanced ArabChat”. A conversational Agent is a computer program that attempts to simulate conversations between machine and human. Some of lessons was learned by evaluating the previous work of ArabChat . These lessons revealed that two major issues affected the ArabChat’s performance negatively. Firstly, the need for a technique to distinguish between question and non-question utterances to reply with a more suitable response depending on the utterance’s type (question and non-question based utterances). Secondly, the need for a technique to handle an utterance targeting many topics that require firing many rules at the same time. Therefore, in this paper, the “Enhanced ArabChat” will cover these enhancements to improve the ArabChat’s performance. A real experiment has been done in Applied Science University in Jordan as an information point advisor for their native Arabic students to evaluate the Enhanced ArabChat.