ChatGent Project

The project

Imagine this, you're come back from your holiday and you hear noise outside. You notice there are roadworks and want to know more. But you really don't want to go digging through endless legal documents. That's where ChatGent comes in.

To make the decisions made by the city of Ghent more accessible to everyone, we created ChatGent. ChatGent is a proof of concept for a smart search which combines a conventional search with a the concepts of a chat bot. As you can see, the search bar has been replaced with a larger box, allowing users to ask questions in natural language. ChatGent will then use Natural Language Processing to turn a user's question into a SPARQL query. This is done by sending it to the OpenAI API, together with a selection of some of our examples, as well as the labels. This will result in a query which can be used to search through the city's decisions.

Then we actually send the query to the city's SPARQL endpoint. This will return a subset of the decisions, which we can use to compile an answer and a summary. This is done by using the OpenAI API again to generate a summary of the decisions. This summary is then displayed to the user, together with all relevant sources as well as any other relevant pages.

If you want to take a look at the proof-of-concept we developed, you can find it down below. While this is just a proof-of-concept, we believe that this could be a great way to make decisions more accessible to everyone.