A Domain-Specific Generative Chatbot Trained from Little Data

Abstract

Accurate generative chatbots are usually trained on large datasets of question–answer pairs. Despite such datasets not existing for some languages, it does not reduce the need for companies to have chatbot technology in their websites. However, companies usually own small domain-specific datasets (at least in the form of an FAQ) about their products, services, or used technologies. In this research, we seek effective solutions to create generative seq2seq-based chatbots from very small data. Since experiments are carried out in English and morphologically complex Lithuanian languages, we have an opportunity to compare results for languages with very different characteristics. We experimentally explore three encoder–decoder LSTM-based approaches (simple LSTM, stacked LSTM, and BiLSTM), three word embedding types (one-hot encoding, fastText, and BERT embeddings), and five encoder–decoder architectures based on different encoder and decoder vectorization units. Furthermore, all offered approaches are applied to the pre-processed datasets with removed and separated punctuation. The experimental investigation revealed the advantages of the stacked LSTM and BiLSTM encoder architectures and BERT embedding vectorization (especially for the encoder). The best achieved BLUE on English/Lithuanian datasets with removed and separated punctuation was ~0.513/~0.505 and ~0.488/~0.439, respectively. Better results were achieved with the English language, because generating different inflection forms for the morphologically complex Lithuanian is a harder task. The BLUE scores fell into the range defining the quality of the generated answers as good or very good for both languages. This research was performed with very small datasets having little variety in covered topics, which makes this research not only more difficult, but also more interesting. Moreover, to our knowledge, it is the first attempt to train generative chatbots for a morphologically complex language.