Mining the Chatbot Brain to Improve COVID-19 Bot Response Accuracy

People often communicate with auto-answering tools such as conversational agents due to their 24/7 availability and unbiased responses. However, chatbots are normally designed for specific purposes and areas of experience and cannot answer questions outside their scope. Chatbots employ Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to infer their responses. There is a need for a chatbot that can learn from inquiries and expand its area of experience with time. This chatbot must be able to build profiles representing intended topics in a similar way to the human brain for fast retrieval. This study proposes a methodology to enhance a chatbot's brain functionality by clustering available knowledge bases on sets of related themes and building representative profiles. We used a COVID-19 information dataset to evaluate the proposed methodology. The pandemic has been accompanied by an “infodemic” of fake news. The chatbot was evaluated by a medical doctor and a public trial of 308 real users. Evaluations were obtained and statistically analyzed to measure effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction as described by the ISO9214 standard. The proposed COVID-19 chatbot system relieves doctors from answering questions. Chatbots provide an example of the use of technology to handle an infodemic.