Building multilingual chatbots with language-agnostic KGs

CEFAT4Cities project targets the development of multilingual cross-border eGovernment services via a software layer that facilitates the conversion of natural-language administrative procedures into machine-readable data. We showcase the effectiveness of this solution embedded in SmartBot, a prototypical multilingual chatbot, developed for the Vienna Business Agency (VBA) in scope of the CEFAT4Cities project. SmartBot makes VBA's services discoverable in a user-friendly way, fine-targeting such topics as starting a new business and finding relevant grants among hundreds of funding opportunities. It is driven by multilingual AI that contains the results of CEFAT4Cities workflows, integrated into its domain knowledge along with multilingual domain-specific vocabularies, represented in a language-agnostic knowledge graph in Coreon. Thanks to the integrated MKS, SmartBot is able to infer connections between language-agnostic concepts and can deal with terms, previously unseen by the bot's language model.