NLP‐Supported Chatbot for Cigarette Smoking Cessation

Summary

Globally, cigarette smoking accounts for 8 million premature deaths and 25 percent of all cancer deaths annually. Despite progress made by government policies, anti‐smoking campaigns, and shifting norms, existing public health interventions continue to have very modest treatment engagement and cessation rates. Conversational chatbots are becoming ubiquitous in society. They use natural language processing—usually in the form of large language models—to understand user questions and provide conversational responses. This chapter describes the three‐year process (2020 to 2023) that lead to the development of a chatbot for smoking cessation capable of answering user's specific clinical questions about quitting smoking. It provides the core conversational feature of a chatbot for smoking cessation, named QuitBot, with a main function that would allow users to ask freeform and open‐ended questions about quitting cigarette smoking and for the QuitBot to respond with accurate, concise, professional, and non‐repetitive answers.