The chatbot example

In the beginning of this chapter, we talked a bit about chatbots and NLP, so let's try to implement something simple using seq2seq and RL training. In total, there are two large groups of chatbots distinguished: entertainment human-mimicking and goal-oriented chatbots. The first group is supposed to entertain a user giving human-like replies to a user's phrases, without fully understanding them. The latter category is much harder to implement and is supposed to solve a user's problem: provide information, change reservations or switch on and off your home toaster. Most of the latest efforts in the industry are focused on the goal-oriented group, but the problem is far from being fully solved yet. As this chapter is supposed to give a short example of the methods described, we'll focus on training an entertainment bot using an online dataset with phrases extracted from movies.

Despite the simplicity of this problem, this example is large in terms of...