TruthBot: An Automated Conversational Tool for Intent Learning, Curated Information Presenting, and Fake News Alerting
This addresses the need for reliable information and fake news detection, particularly for users during events like COVID-19, though it is incremental as it combines existing methods into a unified tool.
The authors tackled the problem of providing trustworthy information and fact-checking on specific topics by developing TruthBot, a multilingual conversational chatbot that learns user intents and responds with curated or web-searched information, achieving significantly better performance than competitors in experiments.
We present TruthBot, an all-in-one multilingual conversational chatbot designed for seeking truth (trustworthy and verified information) on specific topics. It helps users to obtain information specific to certain topics, fact-check information, and get recent news. The chatbot learns the intent of a query by training a deep neural network from the data of the previous intents and responds appropriately when it classifies the intent in one of the classes above. Each class is implemented as a separate module that uses either its own curated knowledge-base or searches the web to obtain the correct information. The topic of the chatbot is currently set to COVID-19. However, the bot can be easily customized to any topic-specific responses. Our experimental results show that each module performs significantly better than its closest competitor, which is verified both quantitatively and through several user-based surveys in multiple languages. TruthBot has been deployed in June 2020 and is currently running.