Chapter 8: Building a Chatbot Using Attention-Based Neural Networks

If you have ever watched any futuristic sci-fi movies, chances are you will have seen a human talk to a robot. Machine-based intelligence has been a long-standing feature in works of fiction; however, thanks to recent advances in NLP and deep learning, conversations with a computer are no longer a fantasy. While we may be many years away from true intelligence, where computers are able to understand the meaning of language in the same way that humans do, machines are at least capable of holding a basic conversation and giving a rudimentary impression of intelligence.

In the previous chapter, we looked at how to construct sequence-to-sequence models to translate sentences from one language into another. A conversational chatbot that is capable of basic interactions works in much the same way. When we talk to a chatbot, our sentence becomes the input to the model. The output is whatever the chatbot chooses to reply...