ChEMBL Bot - A Chat Bot for ChEMBL database

ChEMBL is a chemical database that provides curated bioactivity data along with extensive annotations about compounds (Ex. biological relevance, medicinal uses, pharmacology). It is of general interest to experts from diverse areas. This makes it imperative that multiple access end-points be made available so it reaches a diverse set of users. ChEMBL already produces various ways to access the resources including web URL, REST APIs, MySQL/XML downloads, etc. This paper introduces a chat bot called “ChEMBL Bot”, which seeks to complement the ways in which ChEMBL may be accessed. The chat bot is an extensible tool that responds to queries around ChEMBL compounds using casual parlance to address questions pertaining to the compounds’ associations with targets, diseases, mechanisms of action, phase of approval (FDA) and patents. It is a conversational agent that uses semantics deduced from ChEMBL data and relies on natural language processing tools via Dialogflow.