Bidirectional attentional mechanism for Arabic chatbot

A chatbot is an intelligent agent that developed based on Natural language processing (NLP) to interact with people in a natural language. The development of multiple deep NLP models has allowed for the creation of a vector representation of words and sentences that captures meaning in context. In this paper, a generative Arabic chatbot is trained with the Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model based on encoder-decoder architecture. It utilizes both the bi-directional encoder types of Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The chatbot was trained using preprocessed dataset of 12 k conversations that were translated from English to Arabic. An attention layer was provided to the RNNs to focus on the important data between the input and output sequences. The obtained results showed that the proposed chatbot performed well with long sentences and elicited positive responses. In addition to that BiLSTM with attention performs better than BiGRU without attention. To assess the model, the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) Score is employed.