What Is Natural Language Understanding?

NLP is the general term for a set of technologies that deal with natural language. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a focused subset of NLP that deals with actual conversational input.

NLU can handle unstructured inputs and convert them into a structured, machine-understandable form. Words that the user enters are transformed into intents and entities, or slots. The NLU chatbot is further able to infer intents and slots from user input, which may be similar to – but not the same as – the examples it has been trained with.

Core Concepts in a Nutshell

Before we can get started with building chatbots, you will need to understand some concepts first. Let's take a look at the technical meaning of the term chatbot and the names of the pieces that make up a chatbot and work together to deliver a conversational experience to the user.

Chatbot

A chatbot, also known as a bot or artificial conversation entity...