A Framework for Domain-Specific Natural Language Information Brokerage

Service providers — from public institutions to primary care facilities — need to constantly attend to clients’ inquiries to provide useful information and directive guidelines. Ensuring high quality service is challenging as it not only demands detailed domain-specific knowledge, but also the ability to quickly understand the clients’ issues through their diverse — and often casual — descriptions. This paper aims to provide a framework for the development of an automated information broker agent who performs the task of a helper. The main task of the agent is to interact with the client and direct them to obtain further services that cater their personalized need. To do so, the agent should accomplish a sequence of tasks that include natural language inquiry, knowledge gathering, reasoning, and giving feedback; in this way, it simulates a human helper to engage in interaction with the client. The framework combines a question-answering reasoning mechanism while utilizing domain-specific knowledge base. When the users cannot describe clearly their needs, the system tries to narrow down the possibilities by an iterative question-answering process, until it eventually identifies the target. In realizing our framework, we make a proof-of-concept project, Mandy, a primary care chatbot system created to assist healthcare staffs by automating the patient intake process. We describe in detail the system functionalities and design of the system, and evaluate our proof-of-concept on benchmark case studies.