A Prototype Conversational Agent for Dietary Supplements

Esha Singh, Anusha Bompelli, Andrew Yang, Andrew Wang, Serguei Pakhomov, Rui Zhang

Abstract: According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (DSQAP), approximately 8 out of every 10 people in the United States take dietary supplements, including vitamins and mineral supplements, representing an annual expenditure of more than $40 billion. Opened domain question answering (QA) systems or search engines might not be able to resolve complex specialized queries with enough relevance and coherence in one conversation turn. Therefore, we developed a prototype conversational agent(CA) system catered to resolve user queries regarding dietary supplements. This pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of using MindMeld and iDISK domain knowledge base to develop an CA system responding 77% questions in a good way.