Conversational agents are designed to understand dialogs and generate meaningful responses to communicate with humans. After the popularity of ChatGPT, with its surprising performance and powerful conversational ability, commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) for general NLP tasks such as GPT-4 [1], etc., sprung up and brought the generative AI as a solution to the public view. These LLMs work quite well in content generation tasks, but their deficiency in fact-and-knowledge-oriented tasks is wellestablished by now [13]. These models themselves cannot tell whether the text they generate is based on facts or made-up stories, and they cannot always follow the given data and rules strictly and sometimes even modify the data at will, also called hallucination. The reasoning that these LLMs appear to perform is also at a very shallow level.

The development of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, has enabled the construction of several socialbots, like ChatGPT, that are receiving a lot of attention for their ability to simulate a human conversation. However, the conversation is not guided by a goal and is hard to control. In addition, because LLMs rely more on pattern recognition than deductive reasoning, they can give confusing answers and have difficulty integrating multiple topics into a cohesive response. These limitations often lead the LLM to deviate from the main topic to keep the conversation interesting. We propose AutoCompanion, a socialbot that uses an LLM model to translate natural language into predicates (and vice versa) and employs commonsense reasoning based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) to hold a social conversation with a human. In particular, we rely on s(CASP), a goal-directed implementation of ASP as the backend. This paper presents the framework design and how an LLM is used to parse user messages and generate a response from the s(CASP) engine output. To validate our proposal, we describe (real) conversations in which the chatbot's goal is to keep the user entertained by talking about movies and books, and s(CASP) ensures (i) correctness of answers, (ii) coherence (and precision) during the conversation, which it dynamically regulates to achieve its specific purpose, and (iii) no deviation from the main topic.