A Bi-Lingual Counselling Chatbot Application for Support of Gender Based Violence Victims in Kenya
Sylvia Mutinda, Henry Muchiri · 2024
Gender-based violence (GBV) remains one of the highest prevailing human rights violations globally, surpassing national, social, and economic boundaries. However, due to its nature, it is masked within a culture of silence and causes detrimental effects on the dignity, health, autonomy, and security of its victims. Technological approaches have been established to tackle GBV as intermediate and supplementary support for victims as part of UN-SDG 5. Conversational Agents such as Chomi, ChatPal, and Namubot have been developed for counselling GBV victims who struggle with disclosing their predicament to humans. The existing chatbots, however, are not fit for Kenyan victims because they utilize languages such as Swedish, Finnish, Isizulu, Setswana and Isixhosa in addition to incorporating referral services specific to their regions. This research addressed this gap by developing a chatbot application suitable for the Kenyan region for counselling GBV victims using both Kiswahili and English, the languages predominantly used in the country, and including contacts to referral services. The methodology utilized involved developing a chatbot application based on the Rasa open-source AI framework by training a model using a pre-processed counselling dataset. The performance of the model was evaluated using the NLU confidence score to determine the model's certainty in its intent identification and a confusion matrix was generated which resulted in 100%classification threshold accuracy for 80% training and 20% testing data split. Python's Fuzzy Matching Token Set Ratio score was also used to determine the response that best matches the input with results indicating satisfactory performance of the model ranging between 63% and 92% for GBV queries input. The developed model was then integrated into a web application as the user interface for user access and interaction with the model hence achieving the research objective of developing a chatbot application to conduct counselling for GBV victims in Kenya using English and Kiswahili languages.