Using a Machine Learning Approach to Model a Chatbot for Ceylon Electricity Board Website

Abstract

Customer support is one of the main aspects of the user experience for online services. However, the rise of natural language processing techniques, the industry is looking at automated chatbot solutions to provide quality services to an ever-growing user base. In Sri Lanka, Ceylon Electricity Board website is one of the largest websites that customers use always to get information about electricity services. Hence, a chatbot system is very essential in CEB website. This paper presents a study about implementing and evaluating of a chatbot model for CEB website. This study implements virtual conversation agent based on deep learning algorithm which is multilayer perceptron neural network and a special text dataset for conversations about CEB services. The conversation agent model is made by utilizing the natural language processing techniques to facilitate the processing of user messages. The output of this research is the response from the chatbot and identify the best testing method to get highest accuracy for chatbot model. The chatbot model achieves the highest accuracy with the number of epochs set to 2000 and the learning rate value of 0.01 on response context data training so that it gets 78.8% accuracy. Keywords: Natural language processing, chatbot, deep learning, multilayer perceptron neural network, Monte Carlo cross validation, k-fold cross validation