Can a Chatbot Determine My Diet?: Addressing Challenges of Chatbot Application for Meal Recommendation

Abstract: Poor nutrition can lead to reduced immunity, increased susceptibility to disease, impaired physical and mental development, and reduced productivity. A conversational agent can support people as a virtual coach, however building such systems still have its associated challenges and limitations. This paper describes the background and motivation for chatbot systems in the context of healthy nutrition recommendation. We discuss current challenges associated with chatbot application, we tackled technical, theoretical, behavioural, and social aspects of the challenges. We then propose a pipeline to be used as guidelines by developers to implement theoretically and technically robust chatbot systems.