Theano: A Greek-speaking conversational agent for COVID-19

Nikoletta Ventoura, Kosmas Palios, Yannis Vasilakis, Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Nassos Katsamanis, Vassilis Katsouros


Abstract
Conversational Agents (CAs) can be a proxy for disseminating information and providing support to the public, especially in times of crisis. CAs can scale to reach larger numbers of end-users than human operators, while they can offer information interactively and engagingly. In this work, we present Theano, a Greek-speaking virtual assistant for COVID-19. Theano presents users with COVID-19 statistics and facts and informs users about the best health practices as well as the latest COVID-19 related guidelines. Additionally, Theano provides support to end-users by helping them self-assess their symptoms and redirecting them to first-line health workers. The relevant, localized information that Theano provides, makes it a valuable tool for combating COVID-19 in Greece. Theano has already conversed with different users in more than 170 different conversations through a web interface as a chatbot and over the phone as a voice bot.
Anthology ID:
2021.nlp4posimpact-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anjalie Field, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Maarten Sap, Zhijing Jin, Jieyu Zhao, Chris Brockett
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
36–46
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4posimpact-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.nlp4posimpact-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikoletta Ventoura, Kosmas Palios, Yannis Vasilakis, Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Nassos Katsamanis, and Vassilis Katsouros. 2021. Theano: A Greek-speaking conversational agent for COVID-19. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 36–46, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Theano: A Greek-speaking conversational agent for COVID-19 (Ventoura et al., NLP4PI 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4posimpact-1.5.pdf