iContractBot: A Chatbot for Smart Contracts' Specification and Code Generation

TL;DR

iContractBot is an interactive chatbot that simplifies smart contract specification and code generation by guiding users through modeling using a domain-specific language, making smart contract development more accessible.

Contribution

The paper introduces iContractBot, a novel chatbot framework that integrates with a domain-specific modeling language to facilitate smart contract development for non-technical users.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated smart contract creation via chatbot interaction

Integrated iContractBot with iContractML for model instantiation

Generated smart contract code from conversational inputs

Abstract

Recently, Blockchain technology adoption has expanded to many application areas due to the evolution of smart contracts. However, developing smart contracts is non-trivial and challenging due to the lack of tools and expertise in this field. A promising solution to overcome this issue is to use Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), however, using models still involves a learning curve and might not be suitable for non-technical users. To tackle this challenge, chatbot or conversational interfaces can be used to assess the non-technical users to specify a smart contract in gradual and interactive manner. In this paper, we propose iContractBot, a chatbot for modeling and developing smart contracts. Moreover, we investigate how to integrate iContractBot with iContractML, a domain-specific modeling language for developing smart contracts, and instantiate intention models from the chatbot. The iContractBot framework provides a domain-specific language (DSL) based on the user intention and performs model-to-text transformation to generate the smart contract code. A smart contract use case is presented to demonstrate how iContractBot can be utilized for creating models and generating the deployment artifacts for smart contracts based on a simple conversation.