How Synthetic Text can solve your training and evaluation problems for your virtual assistants / chatbots

When shopping online, customers frequently have the need to modify their order: exchanging an item in the basket, deleting something already added…

In the last COP25 Climate Summit held in Madrid. Many subjects were being discussed on the matter of a possible climate crisis, and how to face it.

Has Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) something to say about it? Surprisingly, yes, it does!

In previous posts, we have outlined the crucial role of Machine Learning for Analytics (in How to Make Machine Learning more Effective using Linguistic Analysis?), and the implications of using Machine Learning for analyzing and structuring text (in How Phrase Structure helps Machine Learning?).  In a following post, we will explain how Linguistics can complement Machine Learning and how it can be integrated in the same technology stack.

Text analysis is becoming a pervasive task in many business areas. Machine Learning is the most common approach used in text analysis, and is based on statistical and mathematical models. 

Stemming and lemmatization are methods used by search engines and chatbots to analyze the meaning behind a word. Stemming uses the stem of the word, while lemmatization uses the context in which the word is being used. We'll later go into more detailed explanations and examples.  

It is always important to evaluate the quality of your chatbots and conversational agents in order to know the its real health, accuracy and efficiency. Chatbot accuracy can only be increased by constantly evaluating and retraining it with new data that answers your customer's queries. 

Chatbots require large amounts of training data to perform correctly. If you want your chatbot to recognize a specific intent, you need to provide a large number of sentences that express that intent, usually generated by hand. This manual generation is error-prone and can cause erroneous results.

How can we solve it?

With artificially-generated data. Since Dialogflow is one of the most popular chatbot-building platforms, we chose to perform our tests using it.