DSL-Driven Approaches and Metamodels for Chatbot Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Chatbots have emerged as ubiquitous tools for enhancing user interaction across various platforms, from customer service to personal assistance. They are computer programs that simulate and process human conversation, either written, spoken or both. However, developing efficient chatbots remains a challenge, primarily due to the intricate nature of critical components of chatbots like natural language understanding (NLU) requiring a subscription from intent recognition providers like Dialogflow and Amazon Lex. This makes chatbots closely linked to NLP services and can be locked in. Recently, various research studies have provided solutions to reduce the workload of developers and designers. These approaches have proposed model-driven development via domain-specific languages (DSLs), which make the chatbot development process more accessible and more automated. This advancement aims to enhance effectiveness in chatbot development by leveraging DSLs. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of DSLs for developing chatbots, with the first contribution comprising various research topics, tools, approaches, and technologies employed to implement DSLs. Second, this work aims to assess and contrast the primary DSLs currently available for chatbot development, focusing on presenting the key elements used in constructing these DSLs. Third, this study identifies the challenges and limitations of using DSLs in chatbot development.