Knowledge Organisation Systems for Chatbots and Conversational Agents A Review of Approaches and an Evaluation of Relative Value-Added for the User

Chatbots and smart digital assistants usually rely on some form of knowledge base for providing a source of answers to user queries. These may be more or less structured, ranging from free text, keyword search to interconnected knowledge graphs where answers are surfaced through structured query and/or dynamic logics. This paper will review the state of the art and probe the added value to the end user of using more structured KOSs as the knowledge base component of agent architectures. In addition to the extant literature, experimental development of a chat bot for student information based on a partial knowledge graph is described. A key conclusion is that ontology in a broad sense can be used to drive dialogue as much as to derive factually correct or organisationally-approved responses.