Language Disparity in the Interaction with Chatbots for the Administrative Domain

The high impact of the Internet on citizens’ daily life and the widespread use of mobile devices has led the Italian Public Administrations to communicate through the Web and digital media. Chatbots are one of the most recent technologies adopted by public institutions. This work focuses on the interac- tion of citizens with a chatbot able to answer questions about the administrative domain. In particular, the main objective is to identify the relevant variables involved in the reading comprehension process of texts written in the Italian administrative language. A key element of this research is represented by the target population (i.e., Italian second-language learners, elderly Italians, and Italians with a low-lit- eracy level) to ease the access to administrative texts by people with a lack of reading skills.