A corpus-based NLP-chain for a web-based Assisting Conversational Agent

Assisting Conversational Agents are Embodied Conversational Agents dedicated to the Function of Assistance for applications and services to the general public. Assisting agents for the general public are more and more required on the Internet-based new rich- client applications. We have developed a web-based framework to experiment with assisting agents, called the DIVA toolkit, where the Function of Assistance is a key issue, and the Natural Language modality a primary concern. This is why the DIVA toolkit is based on a Natural Language Processing chain (NLP- chain) handling the users' textual questions about the structure and the functioning of the DIVA web pages. This paper describes the architecture of the NLP-chain and focuses on the corpus-based approach developed so as to provide an actual grounding for the intermediate Formal Request Form (FRF), at the heart of the NLP-chain.