Tabular data is the most common format to publish and exchange structured data online. A clear example is the growing number of open data portals published by all types of public administrations. However, exploitation of these data sources is currently limited to technical people able to programmatically manipulate and digest such data. As an alternative, we propose the use of chatbots to offer a conversational interface to facilitate the exploration of tabular data sources. With our approach, any regular citizen can benefit and leverage them. Moreover, our chatbots are not manually created: instead, they are automatically generated from the data source itself thanks to the instantiation of a configurable collection of conversation patterns.

翻译：表格数据是在线发布和交换结构化数据最常用的格式。一个典型例子是各类公共管理机构发布的开源数据门户数量持续增长。然而，这些数据源的开发利用目前仍局限于具备编程能力、可对数据进行程序化处理的技术人员。作为替代方案，我们提出利用聊天机器人构建对话界面，以简化表格数据源的探索流程。通过我们的方法，任何普通公民都能从中受益并加以利用。此外，我们的聊天机器人并非人工创建：而是基于可配置的对话模式集合实例化，从数据源本身自动生成的。