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.

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.

In this blog we will discuss three ways of doing your chatbot evaluation by using:

1. real world evaluation data
2. synthetic data
3. "in scope" or "out of scope" queries

Chatbots can improve customer experience in contact centers by:

• Reducing customer wait time
• Achieving a higher customer satisfaction
• Cutting down contact center expenses and increasing productivity
• Getting to know your customer better
• Using human agents only when it is necessary

Most customer service and contact center executives are honing in on bots because they can handle large volumes of queries. Thus, their service center staff can focus on more complex tasks. As the technology behind bots has improved in terms of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and intent-matching capabilities, companies are increasingly willing to trust them to handle direct customer interaction.