Recently,
I posted about a then upcoming Meetup and my talk about chatbots. Here is a quick follow-up. To compile stuff for that presentation and some other upcoming talks, I created a
GitHub repository "chatbot-talk2018". I has lots of links to get started and to deepen understanding around chatbot technology. Moreover, it contains a
presentation in Markdown for GitPitch for you to use and extend. And finally, I wrote this brief introduction to some chatbot terms or concepts:
- Intents are what the user aims for, the desired action or result of the interaction. An intent can be to retrieve a weather report.
- Entities are (real or virtual) subjects or objects.
For the example of the weather report, entities can be the city or
country, e.g., Friedrichshafen in Germany, or date and time information
such as "today afternoon".
- A dialog, dialog flow or dialog tree
is used to structure the interaction. Typically, an interaction lasts
longer than the user providing input and the chatbot returning a single
answer. A dialog can be highly complex with several levels, subbranches,
(directed) links between dialog nodes and more.
For a weather chatbot, a dialog could be constructed that, after a
greeting, asks the user about the location and time for a weather
report, then asks if additional information, such as a weather outlook
for the next few days, is needed.
- Slots are supported by several chatbot systems.
Slots are used to specify the data items that need to be specified in
order to produce the result of an intent. To return a weather report,
e.g., at least the location and maybe the date or time is needed.
- Context is state information that is carried from
step to step for a specific user interaction. The context typically
stores the information that is already gathered as input (see "slot"),
result-related data or metadata, or general chat information, e.g., the
user name.
If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (
@data_henrik) or
LinkedIn.
