
Milabot: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Chatbot - indescions_2017
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02349
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rayuela
Really throwing the whole kitchen sink at the problem here. They're basically
running a RL algo over an ensemble of every successful NLP algo of the last
decade.

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cs702
Your summary of the paper is both succint and accurate.

What's really interesting to me is that this approach yields state-of-the-art
chatbot results, significantly outperforming other, non-ensemble approaches.

It makes me wonder if the subconscious part of the human mind does something
similar, i.e., when faced with the task of articulating a response, does the
brain subconsciously evaluate a range of possible responses, each generated by
different subsystems, and then choose the best of these responses or some
mixture of them, to respond?

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PaulHoule
Maybe that, or maybe you have a large number of strategies for generating
replies, and you can pick a good one ahead of time, so you don't need to do an
exhaustive search.

Compare it to how a human chess player looks at several possible moves as
opposed to a computer program which will consider thousands.

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Hydraulix989
AI is still very much a search problem -- leveraging what computers are
actually good at doing to try to mimic doing things that they aren't good at.

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otakucode
If I ask it a question and then ask it the same question 5 minutes later will
I get the same answer? If I tell it something about myself and then ask about
it later, will it remember? Even the 'smartest' chat bots I have ever 'spoken'
with function like someone with no functioning short-term memory or a totally
ephemeral identity that alters with every statement.

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hippich
Is it implemented somewhere as a real code I can run?

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cypher543
A machine learning paper with actual code? Hah! Not likely.

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sgt101
Get thee to github, there's a bunch. Not least the whole cannon of Tensorflow,
but in terms of research all of the GAN stuff last year was on git as the
papers hit.

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thinbeige
Slighlty OT: Did run many chatsbots in various fields. Chatbots won't be the
next big thing, not at all. Chats are a specific channel for more specific use
cases, none of them created any killer app.

Maybe we need more time but chatbots got hyped for too long without any
significant traction. Most are web shops/ agencies that build mediocre
chatbots for brands nobody is using.

Not bashing chatbots just wondering why this topic gets upvoted again and
again.

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SpeakMouthWords
Amazon Echo and Google Home are chatbots, but with a voice interface. They
seem relatively well accepted. Your thoughts?

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sgt101
I don't think they are - I think they are narrow assistants - order things,
search for things, turn things on and off. They aren't there to have a
discussion about your brothers emotional response to the Aphex Twin.

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novalis78
What's really interesting is how they designed their reward function. At the
end of each chat the user can give each conversation a rating. The bot then
tries to achieve a higher level of human interaction satisfaction, neat!

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ma2rten
They say their approach relies on a minimal amount of rules, however the most
prominent method in their ensemble is a rule based bot.

