Generating Text in Chatbots

Cutting-edge artificial intelligence applications can now produce uncannily humanlike creations, from written essays to music and drawings. These applications are a great promise toward artificial general intelligence, to the point where machines understand or learn any intellectual task that humans can perform. Unhindered conversation with a machine has always been at the forefront of this vision. Interestingly, the most common depiction of machine intelligence in popular culture is conversational agents that can mimic human dialogs. In this chapter, we will deal with a particular type: chatbots.

Chatbots have received much hype in recent years; in this chapter, we will discuss related topics from the perspective of natural language generation. Particular emphasis is given to language modeling, which is an integral part of modern chatbot deployments. First, we will look deeper at this core component of modern natural language processing and contrast...