Developing Amaia: A Conversational Agent for Helping Portuguese Entrepreneurs—An Extensive Exploration of Question-Matching Approaches for Portuguese

• Main Authors: José Santos, Luís Duarte, João Ferreira, Ana Alves, Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Information
• Subjects: semantic textual similarity; question answering; conversational agents; machine learning; information retrieval; text classification
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/11/9/428

This paper describes how we tackled the development of Amaia, a conversational agent for Portuguese entrepreneurs. After introducing the domain corpus used as Amaia’s Knowledge Base (KB), we make an extensive comparison of approaches for automatically matching user requests with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) in the KB, covering Information Retrieval (IR), approaches based on static and contextual word embeddings, and a model of Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) trained for Portuguese, which achieved the best performance. We further describe how we decreased the model’s complexity and improved scalability, with minimal impact on performance. In the end, Amaia combines an IR library and an STS model with reduced features. Towards a more human-like behavior, Amaia can also answer out-of-domain questions, based on a second corpus integrated in the KB. Such interactions are identified with a text classifier, also described in the paper.