We present an approach for designing conversational interfaces (chatbots) that users interact with to determine whether or not a business rule applies in a context possessing uncertainty (from the point of view of the chatbot) as to the value of input facts. Our approach relies on Bayesian network models that bring together a business rule’s logical, deterministic aspects with its probabilistic components in a common framework. Our probabilistic-logic bots (PL-bots) evaluate business rules by iteratively prompting users to provide the values of unknown facts. The order facts are solicited is dynamic, depends on known facts, and is chosen using mutual information as a heuristic so as to minimize the number of interactions with the user. We have created a web-based content creation and editing tool that quickly enables subject matter experts to create and validate PL-bots with minimal training and without requiring a deep understanding of logic or probability. To date, domain experts at a well-known insurance company have successfully created and deployed over 80 PLbots to help insurance agents determine customer eligibility for policy discounts and endorsements.

As data science applications proliferate, more and more lay users must perform data integration (DI) tasks, which used to be done by sophisticated CS developers. Thus, it is increasingly critical that we develop hands-off DI services, which lay users can use to perform such tasks without asking for help from developers. We propose to demonstrate such a service. Specifically, we will demonstrate CloudMatcher, a hands-off cloud/crowd service for entity matching (EM). To use CloudMatcher to match two tables, a lay user only needs to upload them to the CloudMatcher's Web page then iteratively label a set of tuple pairs as match/no-match. Alternatively, the user can enlist a crowd of workers to label the pairs. In either case, the lay user can easily perform EM end-to-end without having to involve any developers. Cloud-Matcher has been used in several domain science projects at UW-Madison and at several organizations, and is scheduled to be deployed in a large company in Summer 2018. In the demonstration we will show how easy it is for lay users to perform EM (either via interactive labeling or crowdsourcing), how users can easily create and experiment with a range of EM workflows, and how CloudMatcher can scale to many concurrent users and large datasets.