Proposal of Open-ended Dialog System Based on Topic Maps

In this study, we proposed an open-ended dialog system based on topic maps. It is based on the fact that keywords and dialog answers are mapped to topics and their relationships are considered as associations. Based on this structure, we proposed a method to determine adequate answers that are related to questions asked by the users. We also employed the history of input questions to determine answers based on the context intended by the user. We conducted an experiment to evaluate our system and found that in most cases, the system generated relatively good answers. In the future, we will improve the topic map to contain a significant number of topics and answers, and to improve responses when topics change.