Employing artificial intelligence techniques in reference services in libraries and information centers: A schematic study for designing chatbot software

The field of artificial intelligence and machine learning comes as a newcomer that imposes itself strongly on various academic and societal circles, as many disciplines seek to include it in order to facilitate their activities and tasks, and the field of libraries and information science is one of the disciplines that have benefited from this field in seeking to employ various artificial intelligence techniques in their activities. Its technical and applied functions, especially in responding to users’ inquiries from libraries and information institutions, and the techniques of creating automated chat programs or what is known as Chatbot came as one of the most prominent technologies employed in libraries.
This study seeks to design a chatbot capable of indexing information and extracting it from files, for use in providing many information services, especially in providing the reference service and responding to users inquiries and analysis of one of the most prominent applications of artificial intelligence, which is chatbot programs and their method of work, as well as the study relies on the experimental approach in designing a model for a chatbot program and employing it in the reference service and responding to users inquiries by relying on the programming language Python mainly in program design. In addition to include many ready-made libraries related to the Python programming language, including NLTK, Numpy, Wordnet, and testing the program using the Black Box Testing method to ensure the correctness of the retrieved results.