Empowering Air Travelers: A Chatbot for Canadian Air Passenger Rights
Maksym Taranukhin Sahithya Ravi Gabor Lukacs Evangelos Milios Vered Shwartz
The Canadian air travel sector has seen a significant increase in flight
delays, cancellations, and other issues concerning passenger rights.
Recognizing this demand, we present a chatbot to assist passengers and educate
them about their rights. Our system breaks a complex user input into simple
queries which are used to retrieve information from a collection of documents
detailing air travel regulations. The most relevant passages from these
documents are presented along with links to the original documents and the
generated queries, enabling users to dissect and leverage the information for
their unique circumstances. The system successfully overcomes two predominant
challenges: understanding complex user inputs, and delivering accurate answers,
free of hallucinations, that passengers can rely on for making informed
decisions. A user study comparing the chatbot to a Google search demonstrated
the chatbot's usefulness and ease of use. Beyond the primary goal of providing
accurate and timely information to air passengers regarding their rights, we
hope that this system will also enable further research exploring the tradeoff
between the user-friendly conversational interface of chatbots and the accuracy
of retrieval systems.