Abstract—Commercial chatbots such as Apple’s Siri,
Microsoft’s XiaoIce, Amazon’s Alexa, Jingdong’s JIMI, and
Alibaba’s Alime, have some great prospective in applications
such as hosting programs, writing poetry, providing pre-sale
consulting and after-sales service in E-commerce, and
providing virtual shopping guidance. However, in most cases,
existed chatbots in the world are neither designed specifically
for children, nor suitable for children, especially for children
with ASD (autism spectrum disorder). In order to develop
chatbots that are suitable for children with ASD, the present
study firstly adopted an open source chatting corpus containing
more than 1.7 million question-and-answer Chinese sentences
of chatting histories involving children in many cases, and
screened out more than 400,000 ideal chatting sentences for
model training. Then a generative-based method combing
Bi-LSTM and attention mechanism with word embedding
based on deep neural network was adopted to build a general
Chinese chatbot. The quality evaluation results indicated that
our chatbot can successfully intrigue participants’ interest and
made them understand it well. The chatbot also showed its’
great potential for using in the conversation-mediated
intervention for Chinese children with ASD.
Index Terms—Chatbots, autism spectrum disorder, natural
language processing, generative-based method, deep learning.
Xuan Li is with the College of Software, Xi’an Jiao Tong University,
China (e-mail: lixuan064@ stu.xjtu.edu.cn).
Huixin Zhong is with the Department of Computer Science, the
University of Bath, United Kingdom (e-mail: huixinzhong@outlook.com).
Bin Zhang is with the School of Software & Microelectronics, Peking
University, China (e-mail: zhangbinxy@pku.edu.cn).
Jiaming Zhang is with the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent
Manufacturing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), China;
He is also with Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for
Society, China (corresponding author; e-mail: zhangjiaming@cuhk.edu.cn).
Cite: Xuan Li, Huixin Zhong, Bin Zhang, and Jiaming Zhang, "A General Chinese Chatbot Based on Deep Learning and Its’ Application for Children with ASD," International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 519-526, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).