Guided-search for the Federal Administration Portal
As part of the implementation of the government-wide initiative Online Access Act (German:
Onlinezugangsgesetzes), a presentation of administrative services that are made available digitally to citizens is 1 being created under the umbrella portal verwaltung.bund.de. In the upcoming expansion stage, chatbots with question-answering functionalities will be used as smart assistants for the collection of data required for form filling. As a first step, the discoverability of the available services for citizens must be addressed.
Mission: A chatbot solution is in use in the federal administration that can be adapted to different contexts and addressed through corresponding APIs. Citizens are presented with the content that interests them in natural language dialog (guided information retrieval). The requested information can be output in the chatbot as part of the dialog or as a reference to another page. In the future, a chatbot can be used as a virtual assistant by users, for example, to operate the German government’s administration portal and guide the users through the range of services. Chatbots are multi-channel capable, can be designed to be multilingual, and generate responses via the appropriate channels (e.g., chat, voice/telephone). Through machine learning techniques, chatbots are able to learn more about user groups during dialog and thus respond to them better. The portal is based on structured data, which is available in English and German.
During the project, students successfully implemented a complete guided-search based chatbot, that covers such topic of the Federal Portal as: Family, Work and Profession.
