Looking for a movie to watch? IAI MovieBot is here to help!

IAI MovieBot is a conversational recommender system for movies. Throughout a conversation, IAI MovieBot asks you questions related to your preferences, such as the genre and the release year of the movie you are looking for. Based on your answers, IAI MovieBot tries to recommend you a movie that matches your preferences and reply to your question on it. Give it a try here: https://gustav1.ux.uis.no/moviebotv2/!

Watch an example of a conversation with IAI MovieBot:

IAI MovieBot is built on a modular architecture, which facilitates its extension and customization. It comprises five main components. The natural language understanding component processes the user's input and extracts the relevant information. This information is then used by the dialogue manager that keeps track of the conversation state and decides the next action of IAI MovieBot. The dialogue manager interacts with the recommendation engine, which retrieves the movie recommendations based on the current conversation state and the user's preferences. These preferences are stored in the user model, which is updated throughout the conversation. Finally, a response (corresponding to the action selected by the dialogue manager) is generated by the natural language generation component.

IAI MovieBot is an on-going project by the IAI group at the University of Stavanger that started in 2020. It serves as a research platform to perform experiments in the field of conversational recommender systems. Over the years, we have been working on extending the components to support different methods and models. For example, we recently added a transformer-based model to perform natural language understanding and deep neural networks to select the next action in the dialogue manager. So, IAI MovieBot can be configured to use different models and methods for each component. Another great feature of IAI MovieBot is its user-friendly interface, so we can easily conduct user studies.

For technical details about IAI MovieBot, please visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/iai-group/MovieBot.
 

By Nolwenn Bernard, PhD candidate, University of Stavanger

Published 2024-08-05