UX Antwerp Meetup, 31st of January 2017 - Sjoera Roggeman, UX designer at iCapps (Antwerp, Belgium) "Chatbots: building intelligent systems" If you are a smartphone user, chances are that you have already heard about chatbots, or are even actively using one. Chatbots are the newest online trend, and more and more companies are using them to provide services to their clients. But how exactly do they work? What is the intelligence behind these bots that makes them respond in an accurate way? As a UX designer with a background in linguistics, Sjoera will share with us some insights on the mechanics of AI and Natural Language Processing. – Sjoera is UX designer at iCapps, one of the most prominent app development agencies in Belgium. She has worked with a variety of clients, delivering user-friendly and innovative user interfaces for desktop, tablet and mobile.

1. www.icapps.com
Chatbots: building intelligent systems
Sjoera Roggeman

2. WHAT ARE CHATBOTS?

3. “A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and
sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with
via a chat interface”
Matt Schlicht - Founder of Chatbot magazine

4. Poncho

5. Lybrate

6. Madison Reed

7. HOW DOES IT WORK?

8. TWO TYPES OF CHATBOTS
1. Based on rules
2. Based on Artificial
intelligence

9. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
“An ideal intelligent machine is a flexible rational
agent that perceives its environment and takes
actions that maximize its chance of success at some
goal”
Russell & Norvig, 2003

10. • Concept very old: Greek
myths about automatons
• Beginnings of modern AI:
Greek philosophers
describe human thinking
as a symbolic system
• Field of AI formally
founded in 1956
BRIEF HISTORY OF AI

11. • 1997: IBM’s Deep Blue
beats chess champion
Garry Kasparov
BRIEF HISTORY OF AI

12. 2011: IBM’s Watson won the quiz show Jeopardy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp4q60BsHoY

13. • IBM’s Watson
• Understands written and
spoken language +
visuals
• Constantly learning
BRIEF HISTORY OF AI

14. Fields in AI

15. NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING (NLP)

17. Turing Test

18. • Natural language
understanding
• Natural language
generation
• Text planning
• Sentence planning
• Text realisation
COMPONENTS OF NLP

19. Steps in NLP
Lexical analysis
Syntactic analysis
Semantic analysis
Disclosure integration
Pragmatic analysis

20. Lexical analysis
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog .
article adj. adj. subst. verb prep. article adj. subst.
sentence
punct.

21. Syntactic analysis
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
subject
verb adjunct
predicate

22. Semantic analysis
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

23. Disclosure integration
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
He jumps very high.

24. Pragmatic analysis
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
—> A dog is lying down, maybe sleeping (because it’s
lazy). A fox takes a leap and jumps over the dog.

25. • “Intentions” (e.g. there’s
beer in the fridge)
• Sarcasm
• Irony
• Ambiguity
• …
—> Paul Grice’s theory of
“meaning”
POSSIBLE ISSUES
• Utterer’s Meaning
• Timeless Meaning

26. EXAMPLE
“Flying planes can be
dangerous.”

27. NLP in practice

28. Example

29. MACHINE LEARNING (ML)

30. • Microsoft
• Chinese market
• Mines Chinese internet
for human conversations
XIAO ICE

31. This can also backfire!

32. To summarise
‘I’, ‘need’, ‘a’, ‘bunch’, ‘of’, ‘bananas’,
‘,’, ‘some’, ‘yoghurt’, ‘,’, ‘toilet’, ‘paper’,
‘,’, ‘paper’, ‘towels’, ‘1/2’, ‘lb’, ‘of’,
‘hamburger’, ‘meat’, ‘,’, ‘and’, ‘some’,
‘beer’
NLU
check for appropriate
answer in database
‘By’, ‘when’, ‘?’
NLG

33. BUILDING A BOT

34. Motion.ai

35. Wit.ai

36. Google API

37. • One topic or several
topics?
• How complex are the
answers?
• What is the bot’s goal?
WHICH TOOL TO
CHOOSE?

38. • The language is the
interface
• Design with language
• Cooperate with linguists,
copywriters, novelists and
even comedians
TO CONCLUDE: OUR
ROLE AS UX DESIGNERS?

39. THANK YOU!