Meaning Extraction in a Domotic Assistant Agent Interacting by Means of Natural Language

This paper presents a software architecture to let users interact with their smart home devices, through the commonly used social network channels. The software, called FABULOS, is the result of the combination of components used to interact with devices and social networks, and a rule-based artificial intelligence, which implements the base logic for the automation. The core of the software architecture is the translation service, which has the objective of extracting the meaning of the sentences provided by text and voice messages by users in natural language, transforming them into proper device commands. In order to achieve this, the proposed solution relies on an approach which has the capability to interpret and extract the meaning of the intentions plus the entities involved, associated to the sentences sent by the users. A description of a realistic case-study, which shows an example of how the proposed software behaves in a real interaction with an user, is also included in the paper.