Evaluation of an Arabic Chatbot Based on Extractive Question-Answering Transfer Learning and Language Transformers

Chatbots are programs with the ability to understand and respond to natural language in a way that is both informative and engaging. This study explored the current trends of using transformers and transfer learning techniques on Arabic chatbots. The proposed methods used various transformers and semantic embedding models from AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, AraElectra-SQuAD, and AraElectra (Generator/Discriminator). Two datasets were used for the evaluation: one with 398 questions, and the other with 1395 questions and 365,568 documents sourced from Arabic Wikipedia. Extensive experimental works were conducted, evaluating both manually crafted questions and the entire set of questions by using confidence and similarity metrics. Our experimental results demonstrate that combining the power of transformer architecture with extractive chatbots can provide more accurate and contextually relevant answers to questions in Arabic. Specifically, our experimental results showed that the AraElectra-SQuAD model consistently outperformed other models. It achieved an average confidence score of 0.6422 and an average similarity score of 0.9773 on the first dataset, and an average confidence score of 0.6658 and similarity score of 0.9660 on the second dataset. The study concludes that the AraElectra-SQuAD showed remarkable performance, high confidence, and robustness, which highlights its potential for practical applications in natural language processing tasks for Arabic chatbots. The study suggests that the language transformers can be further enhanced and used for various tasks, such as specialized chatbots, virtual assistants, and information retrieval systems for Arabic-speaking users.