BioGraphBot: A Conversational Assistant for Bioinformatics Graph Databases

Chatbots technology allows to easily add a conversational interface to a large set of applications. In this paper, we show a conversational agent based on ALICE framework aimed at playing the role of interface between human users and a bioinformatics graph database. The system has been embedded into the web frontend of BioGraphDB, a publicly available resource that uses Gremlin as the primary query language. To be successfully exploited, domain experts, such as biologists and bioinformaticians, should also have familiarity with that query language. The use of a chatbot allows translating queries expressed in natural language to queries expressed in Gremlin, simplifying the inter- action with BioGraphDB.