ArabChat: An Arabic Conversational Agent

This paper details the development of a novel and practical Conversational Agent for the Arabic language called ArabChat. A conversational Agent is a computer program that attempts to simulate conversations between machine and human. In this paper, the term `conversation´ or `utterance´ refers to real-time chat exchange between machine and human. The proposed framework for developing the Arabic Conversational Agent (ArabChat) is based on Pattern Matching approach to handle users´ conversations. The Pattern Matching approach is based on the matching process between a user´s utterance and pre-scripted patterns that represents different topics organized through novel scripting structure. A real experiment has been done in Applied Science University in Jordan as an information point advisor for their native Arabic students to evaluate the ArabChat.