A Review of Arabic Intelligent Chatbots: Developments and Challenges

Abdulkader, Zena N.; Al-Irhayim, Yousra Faisal Muhammad

doi:10.33899/rengj.2022.132550.1148

	A Review of Arabic Intelligent Chatbots: Developments and Challenges
Al-Rafidain Engineering Journal (AREJ)
Article 17, Volume 27, Issue 2, September 2022, Pages 178-189 PDF (816.58 K)
Document Type: Research Paper
DOI: 10.33899/rengj.2022.132550.1148
Authors
Zena N. Abdulkader^* ¹; Yousra Faisal Muhammad Al-Irhayim²
¹Department of Computer Science, College of Education for Pure Sciences, University of Mosul, Mosul, Iraq
²Computer Science Departement, Collage of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Mosul, Mosul, Iraq
Abstract
Chatbots, or machine based conversational systems, have become popular in recent years in a variety of applications. Chatbots are intelligent technologies that employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) to converse with humans in their natural languages. Chatbot's primary function is to interpret user's questions and respond with the most convenient intelligent and natural responses. In a number of the world's most generally spoken languages, chatbots appear to be quite successful; however, Arabic chatbots have not yet attained the predicted degree of success. Many academics have recently sought to bridge the gap in the implementation of Arabic chatbots by overcoming the complicated linguistic Arabic language features. This survey reviews the chatbots, their categories and implementation techniques. It also, presents some challenges that face the developer of Arabic chatbots due to rich complex properties of Arabic language. Then, most of published chatbot researches that deal with Arabic language are highlighted. Finally, a table of comparison among the mentioned Arabic chatbots is presented. The study concludes that, all the present AI based Arabic chatbots are developed in retrieval mode, and that Arabic chatbot literature is scarce in comparison to that in many other languages.
Keywords
Arabic chatbot; rule based chatbots; AI based chatbots; AIML, pattern matching

References
[1] A. Almurayh, “The Challenges of Using Arabic Chatbot in Saudi Universities”, IAENG International Journal of Computer Science, Vol. 48 Issue 1, pp. 190-201, 2021. [2] A. Gupta, D. Hathwar and A. Vijayakumar, “Introduction to AI Chatbots”, Int J Eng Res Technol (IJERT), Vol. 9 Issue: 7, pp. 255–258, 2020.‏ [3] E. Adamopoulou and L. Moussiades, "An Overview of Chatbot Technology", IFIP International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, pp. 373-383, 2020.‏ [4] L. Fryer, M. Ainley, A. Thompson, A. Gibson and Z. Sherlock, “Stimulating and sustaining interest in a language course: An experimental comparison of chatbot and human task partners”, Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 75, pp. 461–468, 2017. [5] C. Edwards, A. Beattie, A. Edwards and P. Spence, “Differences in perceptions of communication quality between a twitterbot and human agent for information seeking and learning”, Computers in Human Behavior, vol: 65, pp. 666-671, 2016. [6] J. Jia, “The study of the application of a keywords-based chatbot system on the teaching of foreign languages”, arXiv preprint cs/0310018, 2003.‏ [7] O. G. Alobaidi, K. A. Crockett, J. D. O'Shea and T. M. Jarad, "Abdullah: An intelligent arabic conversational tutoring system for modern islamic education." Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering. Vol. 2, 2013.‏ [8] R. Crutzen, G. J. Y. Peters, S. D. Portugal, E. M. Fisser, and J. J. Grolleman, “An artificially intelligent chat agent that answers adolescents' questions related to sex, drugs, and alcohol: an exploratory study”. Journal of Adolescent Health, Vol. 48, Issue: 5, pp. 514-519,‏ 2011. [9] A. S. Miner, L. Laranjo, and A. B. Kocaballi, “Chatbots in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic”. NPJ digital medicine, Vol. 3, Issue: 1, pp.1-4, 2020. [10] A. Fadhil, A. AbuRa’ed, “OlloBot-Towards A Text-Based Arabic Health Conversational Agent: Evaluation and Results”, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), pp. 295-303, ‏2019. [11] L. Cui, S. Huang, F. Wei, C. Tan, C. Duan and M. Zhou, “Superagent: A customer service chatbot for e-commerce websites”, In Proceedings of ACL 2017, System Demonstrations, pp. 97-102, 2017, July. [12] N. T. THOMAS, “An e-business chatbot using AIML and LSA”, In: International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI). IEEE, pp. 2740-2742, 2016. [13] A. H. Al-Ajmi and N. Al-Twairesh, “Building an Arabic Flight Booking Dialogue System Using a Hybrid Rule-Based and Data Driven Approach”. IEEE Access, Vol. 9, pp. 7043-7053, 2021. [14] L. Cui, S. Huang, F. Wei, C. Tan, C. Duan, and M. Zhou, “Superagent: A customer service chatbot for e-commerce websites”. In Proceedings of ACL System Demonstrations, pp. 97-102,‏ 2017, July. [15] B. Kadali, N. Prasad, P. Kudav, and M. Deshpande, “Home Automation Using Chatbot and Voice Assistant”. In ITM Web of Conferences, . EDP Sciences, Vol. 32, pp. 01002, 2020. [16] B. A. Shawar, and E. Atwell, “Arabic question-answering via instance based learning from an FAQ corpus”, In Proceedings of the CL 2009 International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, UCREL, Vol. 386, No. 1, pp. 1-12, 2009. [17] S. Hussain, O. A. Sianaki, and N. Ababneh, “A survey on conversational agents/chatbots classification and design techniques”. In Workshops of the International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, pp. 946-956, Springer, Cham, 2019. [18] S. Al Humoud, A. Al Wazrah, and W. Aldamegh, “Arabic chatbots: a survey”, Int. J. Adv. Comp. Sci. Appl., Vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 535-541,‏ 2018. [19] E. H. Almansor, and F. K. Hussain, “Survey on intelligent chatbots: State-of-the-art and future research directions”, In Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems, pp. 534-543, Springer, Cham.‏ 2019. [20] R. Kumar, and M. M. Ali, “A Review on Chatbot Design and Implementation Techniques”, International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology IRJET, Vol. 07 Issue: 02, pp. 2791-2800, 2020. [21] Y. Song, R. Yan, C. T. Li, J. Y. Nie, M. Zhang, and D. Zhao, “An Ensemble of Retrieval-Based and Generation-Based Human-Computer Conversation Systems”, IJCAI-18, pp. 4382-4388, 2018. [22] E. Adamopoulou and L. Moussiades, “Chatbots: History, technology, and applications”, Machine Learning with Applications, Elsevier Ltd., Vol. 2, pp.100006, 2020. [23] S. A. Abdul-Kader and J. C. Woods, “Survey on chatbot design techniques in speech conversation systems”, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 6, Issue: 7, pp. 72–80, 2015. [24] S. Arsovski, A. D. Cheok, M. Idris, and M. R. B. A. Raffur, “Analysis of the chatbot open source languages aiml and chatscript: A review”, In 9th DQM International Conference on life cycle engineering and management, 2017, September. [25] K. Ramesh, S. Ravishankaran, A. Joshi and K. Chandrasekaran, “A Survey of Design Techniques for Conversational Agents”. Information, Communication and Computing Technology. ICICCT 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science CCIS, Vol. 750, pp. 336–350, Springer, Singapore 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6544-6_31 [26] J. Božić, “Ontology-based metamorphic testing for chatbots”, Software Quality Journal, DOI: 10.1007/s11219-020-09544-9 pp. 1-25, 2021.‏ Ontology-based metamorphic testing for chatbots (springer.com) [27] A. Quamar, C. Lei, D. Miller, F. Ozcan, J. Kreulen, R. J. Moore and V. Efthymiou, “An ontology-based conversation system for knowledge bases”. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 361-376, 2020, June. [28] S. Maher, S. Kayte and S. Nimbhore, “Chatbots & Its Techniques Using AI: an Review”, International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, Vol. 8, Issue: 12, pp. 503-508, 2020. [29] W. Maroengsit, T. Piyakulpinyo, K. Phonyiam, S. Pongnumkul, P. Chaovalit and T. Theeramunkong, “A survey on evaluation methods for chatbots”, In Proceedings of the 2019 7th International Conference on Information and Education Technology, pp. 111-119, 2019. [30] R. Csaky, “Deep learning based chatbot models”, arXiv preprint arXiv: 1908.08835, 2019. [31] J. Cahn, “CHATBOT: Architecture, design, & development”. Senior Thesis (EAS499) University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Computer and Information Science, 2017. [32] H. Sak, A. Senior and F. Beaufays, “Long short-term memory based recurrent neural network architectures for large vocabulary speech recognition”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.1128, 2014. [33] K. Panesar and L. Mudikanwi, “Chatterbot implementation using Transfer Learning and LSTM Encoder - Decoder Architecture”, International Journal, Vol. 8, Issue: 5, pp. 1709 – 1715, 2020. [34] L. Mou, Y. Song, R. Yan, G. Li, L. Zhang and Z. Jin, “Sequence to backward and forward sequences: A content-introducing approach to generative short-text conversation”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.00970, pp. 3349-3358,‏ 2016. [35] M. Mnasri, “Recent advances in conversational NLP: Towards the standardization of Chatbot building”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.09025,‏ 2019. [36] A. Almurayh, “The Challenges of Using Arabic Chatbot in Saudi Universities”, IAENG International Journal of Computer Science, Vol. 48, Issue: 1, 2021. [37] A. Farghaly and K. Shaalan, “Arabic natural language processing: Challenges and solutions”, ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP), Vol. 8, Issue: 4, pp. 1-22,‏ 2009. [38] B. A. Shawar, “A Chatbot as a natural web Interface to Arabic web QA”, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), Vol. 6, Issue: 1, pp. 37-43,‏ 2011. [39] M. Hijjawi and Y. Elsheikh, “Arabic language challenges in text based conversational agents compared to the English language”. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology (IJCSIT), Vol. 7, Issue: 5, pp. 1-13,‏ 2015. [40] D. A. Ali and N. Habash, “Botta: An arabic dialect chatbot”, In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pp. 208-212, 2016. [41] W. Ahmed and P. BabuAnto, “Answer extraction for how and why questions in question answering systems”, International Journal of Computational Engineering Research (IJCER), Vol. 12, Issue:6, pp.18-22, 2016. [42] E. S. AlHagbani and M. B. Khan, “Challenges facing the development of the arabic chatbot”. In First International Workshop on Pattern Recognition, International Society for Optics and Photonics, Vol. 10011, p. 100110Y, 2016. [43] A. Shawar and E. S. Atwell, “An Arabic chatbot giving answers from the Qur'an”, In Proceedings of TALN04: XI Conference sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles, Vol. 2, pp. 197-202, ATALA.‏ 2004. [44] M. Makatchev, I. Fanaswala, A. Abdulsalam, B. Browning, W. Ghazzawi, M. Sakr and R. Simmons, “Dialogue patterns of an arabic robot receptionist”, In 2010 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI,) pp. 167-168, 2010. [45] N. Mavridis, A. AlDhaheri, L. AlDhaheri, M. Khanii and N. AlDarmaki, “Transforming IbnSina into an advanced multilingual interactive android robot”, In 2011 IEEE GCC Conference and Exhibition (GCC) IEEE,‏ pp. 120-123, 2011. [46] M. H ijjawi, Z. Bandar, K. Crockett and D. Mclean, “ArabChat: An arabic conversational agent”, In 2014 6th International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT) IEEE.‏ pp. 227-237, 2014. [47] M. Hijjawi, H. Qattous and O. Alsheiksalem, “Mobile Arabchat: An Arabic Mobile-Based Conversational Agent”, Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl. IJACSA, Vol. 6, Issue: 10, pp. 111-119, 2015. [48] M. Hijjawi, Z. Bandar and K. Crockett, “The Enhanced Arabchat: An Arabic Conversational Agent”, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), Vol. 7, Issue 2, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070247 [49] S. S. Aljameel, J. D. O'Shea, K. A. Crockett, A. Latham and M. Kaleem, “Development of an Arabic conversational intelligent tutoring system for education of children with ASD”, In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications (CIVEMSA), IEEE.‏ pp. 24-29, 2017. [50] D. Al-Ghadhban and N. Al-Twairesh, “Nabiha: An Arabic dialect chatbot”, Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl, Vol. 11, Issue: 3, pp. 1-8,‏ 2020.
Statistics Article View: 821 PDF Download: 669