Robo: A Counselor Chatbot for Opioid Addicted Patients

Opioid as an addiction is a serious public health threat in the U.S., leads to massive deaths and other social problems. Medical treatment and mental supports are considering factors in rehabilitation process for opioid addicts. In this process families and friends play an important role in supporting and help the addict to stay clean. However, they may not know the best action to take due to lack of knowledge or certainty. Therefore, there are situations that addicts tend to use social media as a question/answering platform to seek answer for an inquiry. Unfortunately, It is often difficult to search over pages or different forums for a quick answer and it can be time-consuming, confusing and ultimately frustrating for the addicts. Hence, We propose a novel chatbot that is integrated with state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to retrieve an instant answer for a user's query from Reddit social media. Our experiment illustrates that the chatbot provides answers in scenarios that there is no exact matched question in the discussion forums but there are questions with semantic similarities to the user query. Consequently, we illustrate real use cases where our chatbot retrieves responses from Reddit social media forums.