  Although people have the ability to engage in vapid dialogue without effort,
this may not be a uniquely human trait. Since the 1960's researchers have been
trying to create agents that can generate artificial conversation. These
programs are commonly known as chatbots. With increasing use of neural networks
for dialog generation, some conclude that this goal has been achieved. This
research joins the quest by creating a dialog generating Recurrent Neural
Network (RNN) and by enhancing the ability of this network with auxiliary loss
functions and a beam search. Our custom loss functions achieve better cohesion
and coherence by including calculations of Maximum Mutual Information (MMI) and
entropy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this system by using a set of
custom evaluation metrics inspired by an abundance of previous research and
based on tried-and-true principles of Natural Language Processing.

Computation and Language;Artificial Intelligence