Chatbots as interface to ontologies

Chatbots are simple conversational agents using 'pattern matching rules' to carry out the dialogue with the user and various expedients to improve their credibility. However, the rules on which they are based on are too restrictive and their language understanding capability is very limited. Nevertheless chatbots are widespread in several applications, especially to provide information to users in a new and enjoyable way. In this chapter we describe different chatbot architectures, exploiting the use of ontologies in order to create clever information suppliers overcoming the main limits of chatbots: The knowledge base building and the rigidness of the dialogue mechanism. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.