How does a computer process a piece of text? So that it can do interesting stuff with it. Such as picking the correct meaning out of a sarcastic remark or discerning spam from legit emails. This post explains four of the essential text processing algorithms: one-hot encoding, n-grams, word embeddings and bag of words. Linguistics…
1980s marked a shift towards probabilistic statistical models. Moore’s law allowed for complex computations at scale. Major industry players (IBM etc.) successfully adopted large statistical models. A steady increase of computational power helped the evolution of machine learning algorithms. The new era marked the dominance of statistical models and saw major improvements in text and…
This is another detour into NLP history. If you haven’t, go check the first part talking about the pioneers of modern linguistics. In the middle of 1960s Joseph Weizenbaum came up with program that appeared to pass Turing’s test. Weizenbaum built a conversation simulator, known as ELIZA, using a fairly straightforward approach. The “chatbot” would…
With a pre-trained model your chatbot is able to handle basic interactions, such as greetings. When you venture beyond the basics, you quickly find out that the bot’s responses don’t make much sense. That’s because the NLP model is too generic and the bot won’t recognise specific intents and entities. Similarly, the model lacks rules…
In this part of the series we look at the chatbot architecture and design choices. I keep the explanations short and to the point, so that you can code along. Perhaps, you already have an idea of what to build with Rasa and only need a bit of guidance, or a hint. If you are…
I have long wanted to build a multilingual chatbot. I felt conversation bots in language learning apps or online assistants could do a much better job. With close to zero knowledge about machine learning and NLP in particular, I was looking for a tool that would provide guidance. Yet, I wanted to stay in control…