An Architecture Towards Building a Reliable Suicide Information Chatbot

Suicide is a major health and social issue worldwide; therefore, a simple access to reliable sources of information that can be used by family members or friends of people who have suicidal ideation can be a valuable resource. This information can be provided by means of chatbot tools; however, the reliability and topicality of the chatbot’s answers should be ensured. In this work, we present an architecture to build a chatbot with the aim of providing reliable suicide information in Spanish. The architecture consists of two text classification models (one to check that a user’s question is related to suicidal content, and another to decide whether the user is looking for information or if the question should be derived to a human), and a retrieval augmented generation system that, using as a basis a corpus of documents filtered by experts, generates an answer to the user question. In addition, all the components of the architecture have been automatically tested to prove their suitability to be incorporated to the chatbot. The developed system is a step towards helping in one of the greatest global public health concerns.