English

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

Software Engineering 2021-03-18 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.09314,
  title  = {iContractBot: A Chatbot for Smart Contracts' Specification and Code Generation},
  author = {Ilham Qasse and Shailesh Mishra and Mohammad Hamdaqa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.09314},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:15:12.067Z