(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 8, No. 9, 2017 209 | Page www.ijacsa.thesai.org Aquabot: A Diagnostic Chatbot for Achluophobia and Autism Sana Mujeeb Department of Computer Science COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan Muhammad Hafeez Javed Department of SE Foundation University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan Department of Computer Science CIIT, Islamabad, Pakistan Tayyaba Arshad Department of SE Foundation University Islamabad Islamabad, Pakistan Abstract—Chatbots or chatter bots have been a good way to entertain one. This paper emphasizes on the use of a chatbot in the diagnosis of Achluophobia – the fear of darkness and autism disorder. Autism and Achluophobia (fear of darkness) are the most common neurodevelopment disorders usually found in children. State of the art trivial diagnosis methods require a lot of time and are also unable to maintain the case history of psychological disease. A chatbot has been developed in this work which can diagnose the severity of disease based on user’s text based questions. It performs Natural Language Processing (NLP) for meaning extraction and uses Decision Trees to characterize a patient in terms of possible disease. NLP unit extracts meaning of keywords defining intensity of disease’s symptoms, from user’s chat. After that similarity matching of sentence containing keywords is performed. Depth First Search (DFS) technique is used for traversing Decision Tree and making decision about severity of disease. The proposed system namely Aquabot, proves to be an efficient technique in diagnosing Achluophobia and Autism. Aquabot is useful for practitioner psychologists to assist a human psychologist. Aquabot not only saved time and resources but also achieved an accuracy of 88 percent when compared against human psychologist’s diagnosed results. Keywords—Chatbot; Achluophobia; autism; expert system I. INTRODUCTION A chatter bot or simply chatbot is a piece of software that resembles a human being. In that it can respond to the user’s text-based questions or sentences like human being. In this respect a successful chatbot will be the one whose text responses have higher degree of resemblance to a human being’s responses. The history of development of chatbots is as long as any other piece of software. While chatbots are now available for different types of computers as well as platforms – from PC to Android and iPhone – it is common to note that their main usage is in entertainment and as a chatting application followed by their use as a virtual support agent on various websites as a second usage. This leaves a good room for research in various areas to use a chatbot and psychology is only one such example. As human beings are progressing in terms of science and technology, they are on a sharp decline towards having higher level of psychological problems. These psychological problems can be minor as well as major in some cases. In this sense innovations are affecting user psychology. User psychology refers to psychological analysis of users in interactional situations [1]-[4]. As psychological concepts, methods and theories can be used to analyze human/technology interaction [3], human/technology (especially computer) interaction can be used in determining the psychology of the user. Natural disasters like earthquakes and floods which occur continuously in recent few years till now, have arisen a lot of psychological problems among the people worldwide. And in these conditions there are not sufficient enough psychologists as required. Due to increase in psychological problems and lack of human psychologists there is a strong need to develop a system which is helpful in diagnosis of psychological disorders in order to save psychologists time. At this same time there are a large number of artificial chat bots available, the main purposes of these chat bots is, however, limited to entertainment, client support and advertising [8]. Some of the chatbots are also used for teaching purpose and better learning of students [13], [14], [15]. This turns out to be an interesting point. That is, we can use a specifically designed chatbot to interact with the user, get more information regarding his/her psychology and thus diagnose their psychological problems if they exist. Aquabot specifically focus on deciding whether the user has the fear of darkness or not – or is affected by Achluophobia or not. It can be seen commonly that a human being doesn’t admit that he/she is affected by a psychological problem such as achluophobia. Nor does he/she would like to go to a psychiatrist. Moreover if a friend of his/her tries to talk about their psychological problems, most of the time they’ll end up being angry because the society gives the name of “mantel retarded” to the people having any kind of psychological problems even if it is at very minor level. A chatbot may come very handy in these circumstances so the purpose of this initial diagnosis is to have a rough estimation about the fact that user is affected or not before a real psychiatrist is involved. Our chatbot (that we call as aquabot) specifically focus on deciding whether the user has the fear of darkness or not – or is affected by Achluophobia or not. It can be seen commonly that a human being doesn’t admit that he/she i s affected by a psychological problem such as achluophobia. Nor does he/she would like to go to a psychiatrist. Moreover, if a friend of his/her tries to talk about their psychological problems, most