Chatbots and conversational agents: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Chatbots are replacing some of the jobs that are traditionally performed by human workers, such as online customer service agents and educators. From the initial stage of rule-based chatbots to the era of rapid development in artificial intelligence (AI), the performance of chatbots keeps improving. Chatbots can nowadays “chat” like a human being and they can learn from experience. The purpose of this research is to examine the past research on chatbots (also known as conversational agents) using the quantitative bibliometric analysis. The contribution of this research is to help researchers to identify research gaps for the future research agenda in chatbots. The results of the analysis found a potential research opportunity in chatbots due to the emergence of the deep learning technology. This new technology may change the direction of future research in chatbots. Several recommendations for future research are provided based on the results obtained from our analysis.