Intelligent chatbot dialogue breakdown solutions and challenges: A systematic literature review
Khuloud Alshawkani, Farookh Khadeer Hussain · Knowledge-Based Systems · 2025
Chatbots are being widely used by businesses worldwide to offer customer service and facilitate interactions with their clients. They are becoming increasingly advanced due to their foundation in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, enabling them to address complicated requests and responses. However, chatbots face numerous issues and challenges that could potentially result in low-quality outcomes. One of these issues is chatbot dialogue breakdown, an issue which needs to be solved to enhance user satisfaction and elevate the chatbot quality of service. Although there are several reviews related to chatbots, this is the first review to focus on chatbot dialogue breakdown. In this study, we comprehensively discuss intelligent solutions for chatbot dialogue breakdown. We apply a systematic literature review approach to identify and analyze the methodologies and the datasets used with their evaluation metrics to answer our two key questions. Then, we comprehensively examine studies that offer intelligent solutions to dialogue breakdowns and compare them with our defined requirements to build a chatbot dialogue breakdown early warning system. Finally, based on the findings, we identify seven areas of open challenges that could guide future research.