Sinhala Chatbot with Recommendation System for Sri Lankan Traditional Dancers

Abstract

Traditional dancing which originated in the 4th century B.C. is one of the most popular dancing styles in Sri Lanka. Though it has highly developed throughout the years, novel technologies are not much engaged with the development of traditional dancing. Therefore, Sri Lankans still use ordinary methods even for finding choreographers, dance track editors, props providers and costume providers. These have become the most common problems of Sri Lankan traditional dancers. With the objective of giving a computer-based solution for these problems, the paper proposes an information providing website that acts as a location and rating-based service provider recommendation system capable of solving the ‘cold start problem’. Since most of the terms related to traditional dance are in Sinhala, the web system was created in English as well as in Sinhala for ease of use. A Sinhala chatbot has also been introduced to the system, making it easier for any local user to use and a user-to-user private chat system is also proposed to directly communicate with service providers. The system is able to identify the five closest service providers with the highest ratings for users and generate more user recommendations based on location and ratings. Chatbot has achieved a good level of accuracy in directing users and answering user questions.