Building a Knowledge-Intensive, Intent-Lean, Question Answering Chatbot in the Telecom Industry - Challenges and Solutions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most emerging technologies of the past decade, leading the way towards human and machine interactions in terms of efficiency, accuracy and the overall value gained. This paper describes an intent-lean AI chatbot solution that handles user queries posed in natural language upon business related documents of a single-domain of Hellenic Telecommunications Organization S.A. (HTO). Unlike other traditional chatbot solutions that strictly rely on intent identification, our approach infers the implicit user need in order to provide the most relative documents and text snippets within, as the proper answer. To do this, we proceeded with a custom implementation based on Elasticsearch engine and most common NLP techniques tailored to our needs; i.e., tokenization, lowercase filtering, stop words removal, stemming, fuzzy searching, synonyms, etc. The main challenges as well as the architectural models that thrive to overcome them are being described in detail. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed solution is being measured and the identified features for improvement are being presented.