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A Chatbot-based e-Services for e-Government

Conference Paper · July 2020

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 A Chatbot-based e-Services for e-Government
1
Shomitro Kumar Ghosh, 2Md. Toheen Bhuiyan, 3Raihan Chowdhury
and 4Md. Ismail Jabiullah

Department of Computer Science and Engineering,

Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

E-mail: 1skg.bishal@gmail.com, 2toheenbhuiyan2018@gmail.com,

3
raihanchowdhury1997@gmail.com and 4mij1996@gmail.com

Abstract:
Chatbots are becoming a very essential part of our daily digital life and they are proliferated on
the messaging platform and are engaged as digital assistants by the largest technological
environments. Already, customer service leaders are moving beyond initial chatbot trials into
main streams. A chatbot-based e-services e-Government system has been proposed for
proliferating an environment that can provide all e-services of the government as the largest
technological digital assistants moving beyond initial chatbot into mainstream use. It matters for
three reasons: results, convenience, and future positioning. With good design and
implementation, more than 80% chat sessions resolved by a chatbot in the e-services of the e-
Government.

Keywords: Chatbot, digital life, digital assistant, e-service and e-Government.

1. Introduction:
Action or manner of governing a state thrives on the ability of the government to ensure
efficient, effective, transparent and responsive administration. Bangladesh is a large and diverse
country making the task of governance that much more challenging. Slow and outdated
processes and bureaucratic hurdles have traditionally fettered governance in Bangladesh, but the
recent pivot towards the adoption of emerging technologies is re-invigorating the system.
Towards this, there has been sustained discourse in the recent past to optimize the use of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in fostering efficient governance. As the National Strategy for AI has
validly identified, the development of AI within each sector must consider the incremental value
that the deployment of technology can provide to improve existing processes within each sector
rather than aspiring to be a tool that can replace human decision-making in its entirety. However,
this enthusiasm is yet to be realized by large-scale technological capability and deployment of AI
driven solutions in the five sub-sectors of governance that we considered. We can say, broadly
that in most cases, the use of AI in governance is ‘on the horizon,’ as the institutional and
technological framework for its deployment is underway as is the infrastructure, capacity and
trust needed to successfully adopt these frameworks.

In our research, three key trends are noticed. First, even though there has been enthusiasm at the
prospect of using algorithms across all states, technological capability and implementation is far
from uniform. Some places appear to be more vigorous than other places in implementing the
use of algorithms in sectors such as education and agriculture. Second, most of the AI
technology being used is developed by the private sector, which is working in partnership with or
 contractually with the government. Finally, much of the technology which is at the center of
conversations around AI and governance has already been implemented in other countries. While
Bangladesh could look to emulate some of this technology, it would do well to assess some of
the technological, legal and ethical concerns that have arisen in these countries and leapfrog
these challenges before the technology is implemented in the governance.

AI has the power to transform the way that governments around the world deliver public
services. In turn, this could greatly improve citizens’ experiences of government. Governments
are already implementing AI in their operations and service delivery, to improve efficiency, save
time and money, and deliver better quality public services. Governments need to implement AI in a
way that builds trust and legitimacy, which ideally requires legal and ethical frameworks to be in place for
handling and protecting citizens’ data and algorithm use (Table 1). A coherent national AI strategy is a
good proxy for measuring the strength of AI-focused governance.

Table 1: Government and Public Services

Indicator Source What Source Shows
(a) Digital public UN online service Scope and quality of online services. This is a proxy for both will and
services index from UN e- capacity to innovate in government and public service delivery
Government
Survey’18
(b) Effectiveness of Word Bank Perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil
government Government service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the
Effectiveness 2017 quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility
of the government’s commitment to such policies. An effective
government, in theory, will be more capable of delivering change in
public service delivery
(c) Importance of Sub-indicator in Score out of seven in response to the question ‘to what extent does the
IT to government’s WEF Networked government have a clear implementation plan for utilizing ICTs to
vision of the future Readiness Index improve your country’s overall competitiveness?’, from the WEF
Executive Opinion Survey. This also acts as a proxy for the level of
innovation in government, and desire to use new technologies as part
of a vision for the future

The goal of this paper is to give an overview of the challenging areas of e-services of the e-
Government done by using the chatbots developed by Artificial Intelligence to draw some
conclusions regarding the status, the applicability and the future of e-service technology. This
can be applied for doing all sorts of Government services.

2. Needs for e-Government Services

2.1 The E-Services Architecture of e-Government

Several basic activities need to be supported by any service-oriented environment:
(1) An e-service needs to be created and described.
(2) An e-service needs to be published to one or more Intranet or Internet repositories for
potential users to locate.
(3) An e-service needs to be located by potential users.
(4) An e-service must be invoked to be of any benefit.
(5) An e-service may need to be unpublished when it is no longer available or needed, or
may need to be updated to satisfy new requirements.
In addition to these basic activities there are some other activities that need to take place in order
to take full advantage of the e-services architecture. Such activities include e-services integration
with existing infrastructure, e-services management and maintenance. However, we consider that
the e-services architecture requires at least the following basic operations: describe, publish,
unpublished, update, discover and invoke, and contains 3 roles: service provider, service
requester and service broker. Fig. 1 illustrates the e-services architecture.

Fig. 1: E-Services Architecture

Service Provider: A service provider is the party that provides software applications for specific
needs as services. Service providers publish, unpublished and update their services so that they
are available on the Internet. From a business perspective, this is the owner of the service. From
an architectural perspective this is the platform that holds the implementation of the service.

Service Requestor: A requestor is the party that has a need that can be fulfilled by a service
available on the Internet. From a business perspective, this is the business that requires certain
function to be fulfilled. From an architectural perspective, this is the application that is looking
for and invoking a service. A requestor could be a human user accessing the service through a
desktop or a wireless browser; it could be an application program; or it could be another e-
service. The requestor finds the required services via the Service Broker and binds to services via
the Service Provider.

Service Broker: This party provides a searchable repository of service descriptions where
service providers publish their services and service requesters find services and obtain binding
information for services. It is like telephone yellow pages. Such examples of service brokers are
the e-speak e-Services.
2.2 Anticipated Advantages of E-Services
The following paragraphs focus on the anticipated benefits of e-service approach as compared to
today’s applications.

Interoperability: Any e-service can interact with any other e-service. This is achieved through
an XML-based interface definition language and a protocol of communication. By limiting what
is absolutely required for interoperability, interacting e-services can be truly platform and
language independent. This means that developers should not be expected to change their
development environments in order to produce or consume e-services. Furthermore by allowing
legacy applications to be exposed as services, the e-services architecture easily enables
interoperability between legacy applications or between e-services and legacy applications.

Just-in-Time Integration: Traditional system architectures incorporate relatively brittle

coupling between various components in the system. These systems are sensitive to change. A
change in the output of one of the subsystems or a new implementation of a subsystem will often
cause old, statically bound collaborations to break down. E-services systems promote significant
decoupling and just-in-time integration of new applications and services, as they are based on the
notion of building applications by discovering and orchestrating network-available services. This
in turn yields systems that are self-configuring, adaptive and robust with fewer single points of
failure.

Easy and Fast Deployment: Enterprises using the e-service model are expected to provide new
services and products without the investment and delays a traditional enterprise requires. They
may utilize the best-in-their-class component services without having to develop them
(outsourcing).

Efficient Application Development:

Application development is also more
efficient because existing e-services can
be reused and composed to create new e-
services. An e-service can aggregate
other e-services to provide a higher-level
set of features.

Strong Encapsulation: All components

are services. What is important is the type
of behavior a service provides, not how it
is implemented. This reduces system Land Reg. Services Passport Services
complexity, as application designers do
not have to worry about implementation
details of the services they are invoking. Fig. 2: Chatbot Conversation of User Interfaces

3. Typical System of Chatbot

A proposed chatbot for ensuring the e-Services of the e-Government for land registration and the
Passport office are depicted in Fig. 2. The depicted user-interface of the chatbots is designed by
Adobe XD. Anyone can get the desired services of the e-Government from anywhere and
anytime by using this chatbot-based implemented application.

4. Chatbot-based e-Services for e-Government

The e-services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located
and invoked over a network. The e-services framework enables an application developer who has
a specific need to cover it by using an appropriate e-service published on the Web, rather than
developing the related code from scratch. The e-service approach can be considered as a
component-based approach where components are large and loosely coupled. Furthermore, the e-
service approach advances the component-based paradigm a step beyond signatures, since
information related to the quality of service and to what it does is also published in the service
interface. The identified e-Services (Electronically services) are given below:
• the supply of digitized products generally, including software and changes to or upgrades
of software;
• services providing or supporting a business or personal presence on an electronic network
such as a website or a webpage;
• services automatically generated from a computer via the Internet or an electronic
network, in response to specific data input by the recipient;
• the transfer for consideration of the right to put goods or services up for sale on an
Internet site operating as an online market on which potential buyers make their bids by
an automated procedure and on which the parties are notified of a sale by electronic mail
automatically generated from a computer;
• Internet Service Packages (ISP) of information in which the telecommunications
component forms an ancillary and subordinate part: i.e. packages going beyond mere
Internet access and including other elements such as content pages giving access to news,
weather or travel reports; playgrounds; website hosting; access to online debates etc.;
• website hosting and webpage hosting;
• automated, online and distance maintenance of programs;
• remote systems administration;
• online data warehousing where specific data is stored and retrieved electronically;
• online supply of on-demand disc space;
• accessing or downloading software including procurement/accountancy programs and
anti-virus software plus updates;
• software to block banner adverts showing, otherwise known as Bannerblockers;
• download drivers, such as software that interfaces computers with peripheral equipment
such as printers;
• online automated installation of filters on websites;
• online automated installation of firewalls;
• accessing or downloading desktop themes;
• accessing or downloading photographic or pictorial images or screensavers;
• the digitised content of books and other electronic publications;
• subscription to online newspapers and journals;
• weblogs and website statistics;
• online news, traffic information and weather reports;
 • online information generated automatically by software from specific data input by the
customer, such as legal and financial data, in particular such data as continually updated
stock market data, in real time;
• the provision of advertising space including banner ads on a website/web page;
• use of search engines and Internet directories;
• accessing or downloading of music on to computers and mobile phones;
• accessing or downloading of jingles, excerpts, ringtones, or other sounds;
• accessing or downloading of films;
• downloading of games on to computers and mobile phones;
• accessing automated online games which are dependent on the Internet, or other similar
electronic networks, where players are geographically remote from one another;
• automated distance teaching dependent on the Internet or similar electronic network to
function and the supply of which requires limited or no human intervention, including
virtual classrooms, except where the Internet or similar electronic network is used as a
tool simply for communication between the teacher and student;
• workbooks completed by pupils online and marked automatically, without human
intervention.
• radio and television broadcasting services;
• telecommunications services;
• goods, where the order and processing is done electronically;
• CD-ROMs, floppy disks and similar tangible media;
• printed matter, such as books, newsletters, newspapers or journals;
• CDs and audio cassettes;
• video cassettes and DVDs;
• games on a CD-ROM;
• services of professionals such as lawyers and financial consultants, who advise clients by
e-mail;
• teaching services, where the course content is delivered by a teacher over the Internet or
an electronic network (namely via a remote link);
• offline physical repair services of computer equipment;
• offline data warehousing services;
• advertising services, in particular as in newspapers, on posters and on television;
• telephone helpdesk services;
• teaching services purely involving correspondence courses, such as postal courses;
• conventional auctioneers’ services reliant on direct human intervention, irrespective of
how bids are made;
• telephone services with a video component, otherwise known as videophone services;
• access to the Internet and World Wide Web;
• telephone services provided through the Internet.

4. Technical Challenges and Opportunities

e-Government faces a number of challenges in choosing and implementing the right software
and technology solutions in order to better serve their needs and support their service endeavors.
This has become particularly problematic as companies attempt to leverage existing practices,
systems and resources across the Web. Critical to success in this environment is to find an
integrated, robust e-Service solution that allows a company to leverage existing applications,
rapidly adapt to the unique needs of the service, and continually evolve as service requirements
change over time. For e-services to success, there are a number of technical challenges that have
to be met, many of which are related to the open and hostile environment in which they have to
survive. These challenges are related to:
(a) The e-services life cycle that includes activities such as the description, publishing,
discovery, invocation, integration and management of an e-service.
(b) Some initial activities that have to be performed by the users before searching for a
suitable e-service, e.g. requirements analysis and description of their needs.
The challenges can be split into categories accordingly to three different dimensions: the
complexity of the e-services, the indispensability of the operations performed on e-services and
the level of the abstraction related to the operations. Services may be simple or composite.
Composite services consist of a number of simple services. Operations to simple or composite
services may have basic or value added functionality.
• Basic operations concern functionality necessary to be supported by every eservice
environment, namely e-service description, publishing, discovery and invocation.
• Value-added operations bring value-added functionality and better performance to the e-
service environment, e.g. e-service management, security and accountability.

All kinds of operations, either basic or value-added applied either to simple or to composite
services are expected to expose their functionality at two different levels:
• At a lower abstraction level, i.e. at a level mainly concerned with the syntactic or
implementation aspects of an e-service
• At a higher abstraction level, i.e. at a level where the main focus is on the semantic or
conceptual aspects of e-services.

Low level operations are tailored towards the programmers’ requirements, while high level
operations facilitate the work of business users by shielding off the lower level technical details.
It is expected for the e-service paradigm to prevail if all desirable operations are offered at a high
abstraction level.

The above three-dimensional categorization results in the eight sub-cubes are presented in Fig. 3.

Each sub-cube describes a specific category of technical challenges related to:

(a) low level (syntactic level) basic operations to simple e-services.
(b) high level (semantic level) basic operations to simple e-services.
(c) low level value-added operations to simple eservices.
(d) high level value-added operations to simple eservices.
(e) low level basic operations to composite e-services.
(f) high level basic operations to composite e-services.
(g) low level value-added operations to composite eservices.
(h) high level value-added operations to composite eservices.
 Fig. 3: The Eight Sub-cubes of the Technical Challenges of e-Government

5. Conclusions
E-services are the next stage of evolution for e-business for any government. Perhaps that is the
most intriguing about the e-service paradigm is that what it matters is the e-service functionality
irrespectively of the technology that has been used to build them. Here, we have presented an
overview of evolving chatbot standards and we examined the various technical challenges and
the corresponding research contributions. From this analysis, it became obvious that the
examined existing standards approach e-service development bottom-up and provide solutions
only. There are a lot of hurdles and limitations that must be overcome in order for mass adoption
to occur. It is important that all initiatives cooperate in the development of universally accepted
e-services standards, because one of the key attributes of Internet standards is that they focus on
protocols and not on implementations. Otherwise, competing standards from industry
heavyweights could prevent widespread adoption of eservices.

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