How is their NER model trained?
Trained using SpaCy and fine-tuned with their data of hotel and location entities
In this paper, we present a real-world conversational AI system to search for and book hotels through text messaging. Our architecture consists of a frame-based dialogue management system, which calls machine learning models for intent classification, named entity recognition, and information retrieval subtasks. Our chatbot has been deployed on a commercial scale, handling tens of thousands of hotel searches every day. We describe the various opportunities and challenges of developing a chatbot in the travel industry.
Task-oriented chatbots have recently been applied to many areas in e-commerce. In this paper, we describe a task-oriented chatbot system that provides hotel recommendations and deals. Users access the chatbot through third-party messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger (Figure FIGREF4), Amazon Alexa, and WhatsApp. The chatbot elicits information, such as travel dates and hotel preferences, through a conversation, then recommends a set of suitable hotels that the user can then book. Our system uses a dialogue manager that integrates a combination of NLP models to handle the most frequent scenarios, and defer to a human support agent for more difficult situations. The travel industry is an excellent target for e-commerce chatbots for several reasons: Typical online travel agencies provide a web interface (such as buttons, dropdowns, and checkboxes) to enter information and filter search results; this can be difficult to navigate. In contrast, chatbot have a much gentler learning curve, since users interact with the bot using natural language. Additionally, chatbots are lightweight as they are embedded in an instant messaging platform that handles authentication. All of these factors contribute to higher user convenience BIBREF0. Many people book vacations using travel agents, so the idea of booking travel through conversation is already familiar. Thus, we emulate the role of a travel agent, who talks to the customer while performing searches on various supplier databases on his behalf. Our chatbot has the advantage of a narrow focus, so that every conversation is related to booking a hotel. This constrains conversations to a limited set of situations, thus allowing us to develop specialized models to handle hotel-related queries with very high accuracy. The automated component of the chatbot is also closely integrated with human support agents: when the NLP system is unable to understand a customer's intentions, customer support agents are notified and take over the conversation. The agents' feedback is then used to improve the AI, providing valuable training data (Figure FIGREF5). In this paper, we describe our conversational AI systems, datasets, and models.