From a Natural Language Processing perspective, a chatbot normally consists of many parts — small talk, QnA (question and answer — included intent prediction and entity extraction), context handling (user, session etc.), question completion, personalization, sentiment analysis, and so on. Not every chatbot needs all the above-mentioned capabilities. You can have just small talk and QnA and create a chatbot or assemble small talk, QnA and personalization and handle most of the user’s queries. But every chatbot needs QnA.
In this article, we focus on only the Q part of QnA. This is the most complex part of any chatbot framework and needs expertise in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and in some cases Deep Learning. Intent Prediction and Entity Extraction are 2 major components of the Q part, which helps the system understand the user query in terms of the answer repository. Answer repository is the domain for which we have built the chatbot. The answer repository can be as simple as a set of FAQs or an excel file or as complex as a database, a SAP system, or a knowledge base.
