In this paper, we present a real-world conversational AI system to search for and book hotels through text messaging. Our architecture consists of a frame-based dialogue management system, which calls machine learning models for intent classification, named entity recognition, and information retrieval subtasks. Our chatbot has been deployed on a commercial scale, handling tens of thousands of hotel searches every day. We describe the various opportunities and challenges of developing a chatbot in the travel industry.
@cite_6: Semantic slot filling is one of the most challenging problems in spoken language understanding (SLU). In this paper, we propose to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for this task, and present several novel architectures designed to efficiently model past and future temporal dependencies. Specifically, we implemented and compared several important RNN architectures, including Elman, Jordan, and hybrid variants. To facilitate reproducibility, we implemented these networks with the publicly available Theano neural network toolkit and completed experiments on the well-known airline travel information system (ATIS) benchmark. In addition, we compared the approaches on two custom SLU data sets from the entertainment and movies domains. Our results show that the RNN-based models outperform the conditional random field (CRF) baseline by 2 in absolute error reduction on the ATIS benchmark. We improve the state-of-the-art by 0.5 in the Entertainment domain, and 6.7 for the movies domain.
@cite_8: GUS is the first of a series of experimental computer systems that we intend to construct as part of a program of research on language understanding. In large measure, these systems will fill the role of periodic progress reports, summarizing what we have learned, assessing the mutual coherence of the various lines of investigation we have been following, and suggesting where more emphasis is needed in future work. GUS (Genial Understander System) is intended to engage a sympathetic and highly cooperative human in an English dialog, directed towards a specific goal within a very restricted domain of discourse. As a starting point, GUS was restricted to the role of a travel agent in a conversation with a client who wants to make a simple return trip to a single city in California. There is good reason for restricting the domain of discourse for a computer system which is to engage in an English dialog. Specializing the subject matter that the system can talk about permits it to achieve some measure of realism without encompassing all the possibilities of human knowledge or of the English language. It also provides the user with specific motivation for participating in the conversation, thus narrowing the range of expectations that GUS must have about the user's purposes. A system restricted in this way will be more able to guide the conversation within the boundaries of its competence.
Numerous task-oriented chatbots have been developed for commercial and recreational purposes. Most commercial chatbots today use a frame-based dialogue system, which was first proposed in 1977 for a flight booking task @cite_8 . Such a system uses a finite-state automaton to direct the conversation, which fills a set of slots with user-given values before an action can be taken. Modern frame-based systems often use machine learning for the slot-filling subtask @cite_6 .