Nicola Fanelli


2024

pdf bib
Converso: Improving LLM Chatbot Interfaces and Task Execution via Conversational Form
Gianfranco Demarco | Nicola Fanelli | Gennaro Vessio | Giovanna Castellano
Proceedings of the First LUHME Workshop

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled more autonomous conversational AI agents. However, challenges remain in developing effective chatbots, particularly in addressing LLMs’ lack of “statefulness”. This paper presents Converso, a novel chatbot framework that introduces a new conversation flow based on stateful conversational forms designed for natural data acquisition through dialogue. Converso leverages LLMs, LangChain, and a containerized architecture to provide an end-to-end chatbot system with Telegram as the user interface. The key innovation in Converso is its implementation of conversational forms, which guide users through form completion via a structured dialogue flow. Converso’s chatbots can be linked with multiple forms that are automatically triggered based on the user’s intent. Our forms are fully integrated into the LangChain ecosystem, allowing the LLM to use tools for form completion and dynamic validation. Evaluations show that this approach significantly improves task completion rates compared to LLMs alone. Converso demonstrates how specifically designed conversational flows can enhance the capabilities of LLM-based chatbots for practical data collection applications. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/gianfrancodemarco/converso-chatbot.