A Modular System Oriented to the Design of Versatile Knowledge Bases for Chatbots

The paper illustrates a system that implements a framework, which is oriented to the development of a modular knowledge base for a conversational agent. This solution improves the flexibility of intelligent conversational agents in managing conversations. The modularity of the system grants a concurrent and synergic use of different knowledge representation techniques. According to this choice, it is possible to use the most adequate methodology for managing a conversation for a specific domain, taking into account particular features of the dialogue or the user behavior. We illustrate the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype: a set of modules exploiting different knowledge representation methodologies and capable of managing different conversation features has been developed. Each module is automatically triggered through a component, named corpus callosum, that selects in real time the most adequate chatbot knowledge module to activate.