Before we jump into creating bots and fancy natural language models, we will take a quick detour into natural language understanding (NLU) and some of its machine learning (ML) underpinnings. We will be implementing some of these NLU concepts using Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS) in the following chapter. Some other concepts are available for you to explore using other services (for instance, Microsoft’s Cognitive Services) or Python/R ML tools. This chapter is meant to equip you with a quick-and-dirty introduction into the ML ...