Book Image

Conversational AI with Rasa

By : Xiaoquan Kong, Guan Wang
Book Image

Conversational AI with Rasa

By: Xiaoquan Kong, Guan Wang

Overview of this book

The Rasa framework enables developers to create industrial-strength chatbots using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technologies quickly, all in open source. Conversational AI with Rasa starts by showing you how the two main components at the heart of Rasa work – Rasa NLU (natural language understanding) and Rasa Core. You'll then learn how to build, configure, train, and serve different types of chatbots from scratch by using the Rasa ecosystem. As you advance, you'll use form-based dialogue management, work with the response selector for chitchat and FAQ-like dialogs, make use of knowledge base actions to answer questions for dynamic queries, and much more. Furthermore, you'll understand how to customize the Rasa framework, use conversation-driven development patterns and tools to develop chatbots, explore what your bot can do, and easily fix any mistakes it makes by using interactive learning. Finally, you'll get to grips with deploying the Rasa system to a production environment with high performance and high scalability and cover best practices for building an efficient and robust chat system. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own chatbots using Rasa, addressing the common pain points encountered in the chatbot life cycle.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Rasa Framework
5
Section 2: Rasa in Action
11
Section 3: Best Practices

Chapter 1: Introduction to Chatbots and the Rasa Framework

In this first chapter, we will introduce chatbots and the Rasa framework. Knowledge of these is important because they will be used in later chapters. We will split that fundamental knowledge into four pieces, of which the first three are machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and chatbots. This is the theory and concept part of the fundamentals. With these in place, you will know in theory how to build a chatbot.

The last piece is Rasa basics. We will introduce the key technology of this book: the Rasa framework and its basic usage.

In particular, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is ML?
  • Introduction to NLP
  • Chatbot basics
  • Introduction to the Rasa framework