Enhancing Smart Tourism With Chatbots: Focus on the Metamodel of Domain-Specific Language and Emerging Technologies

Abstract

The tourism sector is adopting smart solutions to offer visitors more personalised and sustainable experiences. By leveraging urban infrastructure and new technologies, tourist destinations aim to enhance the interaction between travellers and their environment. Artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) play a key role in this transformation, particularly through chatbots. They are AI-driven applications designed to simulate human-like conversations, enabling users to interact with digital services through text or voice interfaces. In the tourism sector, they facilitate real-time access to information and services, improving the visitors' experience. These applications typically rely on intent recognition APIs, which may be proprietary, requiring access fees and potentially leading to high implementation costs. This study explores the use of a domain-specific language (DSL) dedicated to chatbot development for smart tourism. The first contribution comprises various research topics and emerging technologies used to improve smart tourism experiences and their impact on key tourism components such as attractions, accessibility, amenities, activities, available packages, and ancillary services. Second, this work aims to present the key concepts of model-driven engineering involved in constructing a DSL and to introduce our approach to building a DSL, with a focus on presenting the DSL metamodel. Third, this study identifies the challenges and limitations of using DSLs in chatbot development.