Arabic Chatbots Challenges and Solutions: A Systematic Literature Review

Since the beginning of Natural Language Processing, researchers have been highly interested in the idea of equipping machines with the ability to think, understand, and communicate in a human-like manner. However, despite the significant progress in this field, particularly in English, Arabic research remains in its early stages of development. This study presents a Systematic Literature Review on challenges faced in Arabic chatbot development and the proposed solutions. Utilizing the search terms "ARABIC," "CHATBOT," "CHALLENGES," and "SOLUTION," (including synonyms) we systematically surveyed studies published between 2000 and 2023 from Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science, PubMed, SpringerLink, IEEE Xplore, ACM, Ebesco, and ICI. Moreover, besides Google Scholar and ResearchGate, we employed a manual snowballing technique to discover supplementary relevant research by examining the references of all chosen primary studies. The included studies were assessed for eligibility based on the quality assessment checklist we developed. Out of 3,891 studies, only 64 were deemed eligible. Many challenges were identified, including the scarcity of well-structured datasets. To overcome this (n=35) studies manually collected and preprocessed data. Additionally, Arabic language complexity led (n=53) researchers to adopt pre-scripted rules approaches, followed by generative approaches (n=10), and hybrid approach (n=1). Furthermore, (n=27) studies employed human-based evaluation metrics to assess the chatbot performance. while, (n=11) studies haven’t used any metrics. Based on conducted research, a critical research priority is providing Arabic with high-quality resources, such as an Arabic dataset that includes dialectal variations and incorporates empathy, lexicon corpora, and also a word normalization library. These resources will enable the chatbot to interact more naturally and humanely. Additionally, hybrid approaches have shown promising results, particularly in low-resource languages, such as Arabic. Therefore, more focus should be dedicated into implementing hybrid approaches in chatbot development. Furthermore, evaluating the chatbot performance is still an open domain for further research and contribution, highlighting the need for innovative standardized evaluation methods.