Towards Open Domain Chatbots - A GRU Architecture for Data Driven Conversations

Understanding of textual content, such as topic and intent recognition, is a critical part of chatbots, allowing the chatbot to provide relevant responses. Although successful in several narrow domains, the potential diversity of content in broader and more open domains renders traditional pattern recognition techniques inaccurate. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture for content recognition that consists of multiple levels of gated recurrent units (GRUs). The architecture is designed to capture complex sentence structure at multiple levels of abstraction, seeking content recognition for very wide domains, through a distributed scalable representation of content. To evaluate our architecture, we have compiled 10 years of questions and answers from a youth information service, \(200\ 083\) questions spanning a wide range of content, altogether 289 topics, involving law, health, and social issues. Despite the relatively open domain data set, our architecture is able to accurately categorize the 289 intents and topics. Indeed, it provides roughly an order of magnitude higher accuracy compared to more classical content recognition techniques, such as SVM, Naive Bayes, random forest, and K-nearest neighbor, which all seem to fail on this challenging open domain dataset.