A Comparative Analysis of Generative Neural Attention-based Service Chatbot

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Companies constantly rely on customer support to deliver pre-and post-sale services to their clients through websites, mobile devices or social media platforms such as Twitter. In assisting customers, companies employ virtual service agents (chatbots) to provide support via communication devices. The primary focus is to automate the generation of conversational chat between a computer and a human by constructing virtual service agents that can predict appropriate and automatic responses to customers’ queries. This paper aims to present and implement a seq2seq-based learning task model based on encoder-decoder architectural solutions by training generative chatbots on customer support Twitter datasets. The model is based on deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) structures which are uni-directional and bi-directional encoder types of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU). The RNNs are augmented with an attention layer to focus on important information between input and output sequences. Word level embedding such as Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText are employed as input to the model. Incorporating the base architecture, a comparative analysis is applied where baseline models are compared with and without the use of attention as well as different types of input embedding for each experiment. Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) was employed to evaluate the model’s performance. Results revealed that while biLSTM performs better with Glove, biGRU operates better with FastText. Thus, the finding significantly indicated that the attention-based, bi-directional RNNs (LSTM or GRU) model significantly outperformed baseline approaches in their BLEU score as a promising use in future works.