Creating a NLP driven chatbot I would like to create a chat bot for an e-commerce website that sells a wide range of general merchandize items, from t-shirts, jumpers to calculators. Its primary objective is to develop a Q&amp;A option for visitors/potential customers, to improve engagement on the website. As such, the chat bot is required to be fairly conversational.
I am experienced in classification et al, but know only the very basics on NLP. Can you provide suggestions on where to begin, e.g., recommended readings/ sources?
Also note, there is currently has no chat bot system in place, and hence no historical conversation data of any form.
The deeplearning.ai Natural Language Processing Specialization, is a great place to start. It'll brush up some basic concepts of NLP and then get into SOTA methods  such as Transformers. There's even a project in one of the courses about building a chatbot using transformers, it also has a ton of papers and other sources mentioned.

Rasa is a great software tool/package to get started with chatbots too. It's a great engaging community so your queries should be quickly answered.