Measuring and Clustering Heterogeneous Chatbot Designs

• Published in: ACM transactions on software engineering and methodology 2024-04, Vol.33 (4), p.1-43, Article 90
• Main Authors: Cañizares, Pablo C., López-Morales, Jose María, Pérez-Soler, Sara, Guerra, Esther, de Lara, Juan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computing methodologies; Extra-functional properties; Natural language processing; Software and its engineering; Software design engineering
• ISSN: 1049-331X; 1557-7392
• DOI: 10.1145/3637228

Conversational agents, or chatbots, have become popular to access all kind of software services. They provide an intuitive natural language interface for interaction, available from a wide range of channels including social networks, web pages, intelligent speakers or cars. In response to this demand, many chatbot development platforms and tools have emerged. However, they typically lack support to statically measure properties of the chatbots being built, as indicators of their size, complexity, quality or usability. Similarly, there are hardly any mechanisms to compare and cluster chatbots developed with heterogeneous technologies.To overcome this limitation, we propose a suite of 21 metrics for chatbot designs, as well as two clustering methods that help in grouping chatbots along their conversation topics and design features. Both the metrics and the clustering methods are defined on a neutral chatbot design language, becoming independent of the implementation platform. We provide automatic translations of chatbots defined on some major platforms into this neutral notation to perform the measurement and clustering. The approach is supported by our tool Asymob, which we have used to evaluate the metrics and the clustering methods over a set of 259 Dialogflow and Rasa chatbots from open-source repositories. The results open the door to incorporating the metrics within chatbot development processes for the early detection of quality issues, and to exploit clustering to organise large collections of chatbots into significant groups to ease chatbot comprehension, search and comparison.