INTELLIGENT TRAVEL CHATBOT FOR PREDICTIVE

RECOMMENDATION IN ECHO PLATFORM

By,

DIVYASHREE
4mw15cs029
 ABSTRACT
 Chatbot is a computer application that interacts with users using natural language in a
similar way to imitate a human travel agent.

 In most cases, it can provide better user centric recommendations. Hence, the chatbot is
becoming an integral part of the future consumer services.

 This paper is an implementation of an intelligent chatbot system in travel domain on Echo

platform which would gather user preferences and model collective user knowledge base
and recommend using Restricted Boltzmann Machine(RBM) with Collaborative filtering.
 INTRODUCTION

 Today, the traditional travel agents present many issues that can be conquered by the
Intelligent one. These Voice enabled Chatbots are becoming more and more popular with
the advent of devices and technologies like Google Home, Amazon Echo, NLP, ML, AI etc.

 In this paper they propose voice based Chatbot which interacts with user in their natural
language through speech for enabling users to search for queries regarding travel domain.

 Here the user interacts with Amazon Echo device which triggers the Alexa skill that
processes the request and constructs a suitable response from the data retrieved from the
knowledge base. The request is processed by the backend server which is hosted by
Amazon Web Services (AWS).
 The back-end database is incorporated into a knowledge base which has been trained using
user ratings.

 The user query is analyzed, and the response is generated using the recommendations from
our deep neural network engine which implements Restricted Boltzmann Machine for
collaborative filtering based on RBM used for count data .

 The proposed system will change how to recommend travel itinerary by incorporating
personal preferences, remembering its users intentions and travel history, and generating
responses using collaborative filtering.
 LITERATURE REVIEW

 Reshmi S and Balakrishna K,”Implementation of an inquisitive chatbot for database

supported knowledge bases”. This paper reports the implementation of an inquisitive
chatbot, which finds the missing data in query and probes the questions to users to collect
data that are required to answer the query.

 Sun Y et al., “Conversational Recommendation System with Unsupervised learning”.

Their system shows how they combine research in personalized recommendation systems
with research in dialogue systems to build a virtual sales agent.

 Salakhutdinov R et al.,”Restricted Boltzmann macines for Collaborative Filtering” .This

paper shows a class of two-layer undirected graphical models (RBM's), suitable for
modelling tabular or count data, and presented efficient learning and inference procedures
for this class of models.
 J.Wei et al.,"Collaborative filtering and deep learning based recommendation system for
cold start items“. This paper combined time-aware collaborative filtering and deep learning.
A specific deep learning neural network is responsible for the extraction of item content
features, while the collaborative filtering model is responsible for prediction of unknown
ratings.

 Santangelo Et al.,”A Virtual Shopper Customer assistant in pervasive environments“.

Their system is able to understand the user needs through a spoken natural language
interaction and exploits a commonsense reasoning engine in order to make inference, store
and retrieve user preferences
CHATBOT ARCHITECTURE

Fig1:High Level Architecture

 Our chatbot system also consists of three main modules:
1. Knowledge base :- Heart of the chatbot
2.Speech recognition engine :-Interface between users and machine
3.Interpreter program

 It is built using technologies like MongoDB, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Neural Networks and a
successful implementation on Restricted Boltzmann machine for Collaborative filtering.

 The front end of the system is an Amazon Echo device and the Amazon Echo mobile
application.

 The back-end of the system is hosted on the cloud and has a server, Travel AI engine,
custom APIs and a database

 The NodeJS server, hosted on our private server, powers the entire system. Custom APIs are
the tools to retrieve relevant information from the web hosted by other service providers.
 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The system consists of various independent modules integrated together to provide all
necessary services. Those modules are as follows:

1. Flight Module: This module will handle all type of conversations related to flights.
2. Rental Car Module: The module would help the user to find a car of their liking in an
easier manner.
3. Hotel Module: The hotel booking module to be designed and determine the destination,
time and the number of guests to book the hotel room for.
4. Web application Module: To make the project more efficient, safe and less time
consuming, there is a need to make a web application .
5. Recommendation Module: Recommendation systems try to predict what user would like
to buy/watch/read etc. depending on the use case. The system provides Hybrid
recommendation system which utilizes both content based and collaborative filtering
algorithm to predict recommendations.
 Fig 2: Two level Recommendation system

a. Content Based Recommendations: Here indexes of all products are built which is then
compared with the preferences set by users. The search is done using Elastic search query
which utilizes TFIDF algorithm to find best recommendations.

b. Collaborative Filtering Recommendation System:The System first creates a vector for all
users and their activity and preferences and then it is used to implement and initialize a neural
network.
 METHODOLOGY

 The flight, hotel and car booking module :are 3-tier modules hosted in AWS Lambda,
custom physical server and our custom DB service.

 Web app: This module focuses on to provide users the capability to register and login
themselves in the application, store all the details in different databases like MongoDB and
MySQL.

 Recommendation Module: All the data available for flight, hotel, and car rental booking are
gathered, after having enough data an Alexa app is created with a user driven voice user
interface to allow users to search for flights, hotels and cars and book them. As in the
beginning we did not have enough/any user data a content based recommendation system
was used as collaborative filtering was not possible.
 Content Based Recommendation System: It does not require data relating to past activity,
so user profile is created which contains user preferences like food, car type ,car brand,
flight carrier preferences etc. Also trip objects present in the database are listed to apply fast
and robust similarity matching algorithms.

 Collaborative Filtering Recommendation System: This is developed to work when the

dataset for users and ratings is large enough to apply collaborative filtering.
 In this approach they show how Restricted Boltzmann machines can be used to model data
like user ratings of different objects like flights, hotels, cars. In this paper focus is on flights.

 So, we have N users, F flights and integer rating values from1 to K. To solve the problem of
efficiently managing the missing ratings value for each user we created N Restricted
Boltzmann Machines, as each user has rated the same set of flights this helps in managing
relationship for collaborative filtering.
 Fig 3:Hidden and visible nodes in the RBM

 Each user is treated as a single training case for an RBM which had M “softmax” visible
units symmetrically connected to a set of binary hidden units.

 A softmax model is used for modelling each column of observed visible rating matrix. To
model the hidden units a Bernoulli Distribution model is used.
 RESULTS
The intelligent travel chatbot using Alexa Beta skill builder, provides more interactivity with the user resulting in
better conversations. After this implementation, they could observe better interactivity in the following
conversation.

User: Book a hotel for 2 people.

Bot: Where do you want to book the hotel in?
User: Denver.
Bot: When do you want to check-in?
User: Tomorrow.
Bot: When do you want to check out?
User: 25th December.
Bot: Here are the top results …

The chatbot retrieves the search results based on the user preferences, previous bookings and the similar
bookings of other users which come up from our hybrid recommendation system consisting of a content based
recommendation engine and an RBM with collaborative filtering recommendation engine.
 CONCLUSION

 Intelligent Conversational chatbots will have a significant impact and it would be more
beneficial as we gain more personal knowledge about user’s preference.

 Implementation of the proposed system shows that most of the basic features available on
the travel Websites can be easily incorporated in a voice enabled chatbot.

 With this implementation we show how a collaborative recommendation system can be

applied to service in the travel booking domain to produce more personalized and accurate
search predictions for a user while stimulating an intelligent conversation in natural
language.
 REFERENCES
[1]Reshmi S and Balakrishna K," Implementation of an inquisitive chatbot for database supported knowledge
bases",India,2016.

[2]Sun Y et al.,"Conversational Recommendation System with Unsupervised learning", In Proceedings of the

10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 397-398).

[3] Salakhutdinov R et al.,"Restricted Boltzmann macines for Collaborative Filtering", In Proceedings of the
24th international conference on Machine learning (pp. 791-798).

[4] J.Wei et al.,"Collaborative filtering and deep learning based recommendation system for cold start
items",2016.

[5] Santangelo Et al.,"A Virtual Shopper Customer assistant in pervasive environments", (pp. 447-456).,2007.
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