A Conversational Expert System Supporting Bullying and Harassment Policies

In the UK, several laws and regulations exist to protect employees from harassment. Organisations operating in the UK create comprehensive and carefully-worded bullying and harassment policies and procedures to cover the key aspects of each regulation. In large organisations, such policies often result in a high support cost, including specialist training for the management team and human resources (HR) advisors. This paper presents a novel conversational expert system which supports bullying and harassment policies in large organisations. Information about the bullying and harassment policies and their application within organisations was acquired using knowledge engineering techniques. A knowledge tree is used to represent the knowledge intuitively, and a dynamic graphical user interface (GUI) is proposed to enable the knowledge to be traversed graphically. Adam is a conversational agent allowing users to type in questions in natural language at any point and receive a simple and direct answer. An independent evaluation of the system has given promising results.

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