Implementing a Pragmatically Adequate Chatbot in DialogFlow CX
Authors: Anna Dall’Acqua, Fabio Tamburini (Università di Bologna, Injenia S.r.l., 2021)
Topic: Chatbots and Dialogue Systems

Abstract
This paper presents work in progress concerning the implementation of a list of linguistic patterns developed in an original way to be pragmatically adequate. These patterns for Italian are strongly rooted in Conversation Analysis and are adaptable and portable into different domains. The platform used for the implementation is Dialogflow CX.

Introduction
Although the first dialogue systems began to appear around the second half of the last century <cit.> is it especially in recent years that we have witnessed a proliferation of these technologies in a wide variety of fields <cit.>. The numerous attempts that have been made to classify them <cit.> and the absence of an unequivocal taxonomy <cit.> contribute to the lack of a methodological approach for designing conversational agents. The recent technological developments have led to the standardisation of the technical frameworks: the main Natural Language Understanding (NLU) platforms, both developed by technology giants such as Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, and Microsoft Luis and those from the open source community such as RASA, contributed to the affirmation of the dominant paradigm based on intents, entities and responses for building conversational agents <cit.>. The existing flourishing literature about this aspect <cit.> has not been associated with equivalent research on methods and linguistic theories that can be pursued for the design phase of conversational projects. During the survey of methodological studies on conversation design, it became clear that there is no shared standard and that various methodological contributions of a practical nature do not refer to a specific theoretical linguistic perspective <cit.>. In this work we embrace the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF) whose validity has been already demonstrated in Dall'Acqua and Tamburini DAcquaTamburiniPRESS; we select some of its most representative patterns and we implemented them on the newly released version of Google Dialogflow CX. This paper is intended as a continuation of the work presented in Dall'Acqua, Tamburini DAcquaTamburiniPRESS, which sets out the theoretical and methodological assumptions on which this work is based.

Conclusion
We have demonstrated the applicability of this method also on the new released version of one of the most important Natural Language Understanding platform, namely Dialogflow CX. Since this version of Dialogflow has been released for the Italian language only in November 2020, to our knowledge this is the only study in which this platform is used for Italian and for the realisation of a conversational project with practical purposes. This is therefore a further and more complete implementation of the pragmatic adequateness of this approach. In the future, we would like to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach on a fully functional prototype that can be adapted not only for commercial purposes, but also for other important application contexts, such as education. Due to the variety of frameworks available for the evaluation process <cit.>, the question of the most suitable evaluation method is still open for further discussion.