A Chatbot for Searching and Exploring Open Data: Implementation and Evaluation in E-Government

In this paper, we present a chatbot to access open government data. Differently to similar systems reported in the research literature, the developed chatbot not only allows searching for data collections, but also exploring information within the collections. The exploration is done via complex queries that are easily built by non-expert users through a natural language conversation. Moreover, as another novel, differentiating contribution, we report a conducted user study aimed to evaluate the chatbot according to the achievement of a number of public service values, as well as measuring distinct objective and subjective metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms traditional methods followed in open data portals.