Conversational AI

11 Building your own classifier

This chapter covers

• Constructing a simple text classifier from the ground up
• Appraising and critiquing a classifier based on what it learns from a training cycle
• Seeing how each training example affects the classifier’s learning
• Building your own classifier

In previous chapters, we learned about how to design and construct an AI assistant, and how to make sure it responds appropriately to the user. AI assistants use classifiers to extract meaning (as an intent) from a user’s natural language input, as shown in figure 11.1. (Some AI platforms refer to the classifier as the natural language understanding [NLU] component.) The intent detected by the classifier is used by the assistant to determine the best response. ...