Chapter 9: The Road Ahead

The field of machine learning is rapidly expanding, with new revelations being made almost yearly. The field of machine learning for NLP is no exception, with advancements being made rapidly and the performance of machine learning models on NLP tasks incrementally increasing.

So far in this book, we have discussed a number of machine learning methodologies that allow us to build models to perform NLP tasks such as classification, translation, and approximating conversation via a chatbot. However, as we have seen so far, the performance of our models has been worse and relative to that of a human being. Even using the techniques we have examined so far, including sequence-to-sequence networks with attention mechanisms, we are unlikely to train a chatbot model that will match or outperform a real person. However, we will see in this chapter that recent developments in the field of NLP have been made that bring us one step closer to the goal of creating chatbots...