Efficient Chatbot Designing

A conversational agent (chatbot) is a piece of software that is able to communicate with humans using natural language. Modeling conversation is an important task in natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, ever since the birth of AI, creating a good chatbot remains one of the field’s hardest challenges. While chatbots can be used for various tasks, in general they have to understand users’ utterances and provide responses that are relevant to the problem at hand. In the past, methods for constructing chatbot architectures have relied on hand-written rules and templates or simple statistical methods. With the rise of deep learning these models were quickly replaced by end-to-end trainable neural networks around 2015. More specifically, the recurrent encoder-decoder model [Cho et al., 2014] dominates the task of conversational modeling. This architecture was adapted from the neural machine translation domain, where it performs extremely well. Since then a multitude of variations and features were presented that augment the quality of the conversation that chatbots are capable of the next section of my paper focuses on adapting the very recent Tranformer [Vaswani et al., 2017] model to the chatbot domain, which is currently the state-of-the-art in neural machine translation. I first present my experiments with the vanilla model, using conversations extracted from the Cornell Movie-Dialog Corpus [Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lee, 2011]. Secondly, I augment the model with some of my ideas regarding the issues of encoder-decoder architectures. More specifically, I feed additional features into the model like mood or persona together with the raw conversation data. Finally, I conduct a detailed analysis of how the vanilla model performs on conversational data by comparing it to previous chatbot models and how the additional features, affect the quality of the generated responses