Lessons from Building a Large-scale Commercial IR-based Chatbot for an Emerging Market

Manoj Kumar Chinnakotla, Puneet Agrawal

Abstract: In this work, we highlight some interesting challenges faced when trying to build a large-scale commercial IR-based chatbot, Ruuh, for an emerging market like India which has unique characteristics such as high linguistic and cultural diversity, large section of young population and the second largest mobile market in the world. We set out to build a "human-like" AI agent which aspires to become the trusted friend of every Indian youth. To meet this objective, we realised that we need to think beyond the utilitarian notion of merely generating "relevant" responses and enable the agent to comprehend and meet a wider range of user social needs, like expressing happiness when user's favourite team wins, sharing a cute comment on showing the pictures of the user's pet and so on. The agent should also be well-versed with the informal language of the urban Indian youth which often includes slang and code-mixing across two or more languages (English and their native language). Finally, in order to be their trusted friend, the agent has to communicate with respect without offending their sentiments and emotions. Some of the above objectives pose significant research challenges in the areas of NLP, IR and AI. We take the audience through our journey of how we tackled some of the above challenges while building a large-scale commercial IR-based conversational agent. Our attempts to solve some of the above challenges have also resulted in some interesting research contributions in the form of publications and patents in the above areas. Our chat-bot currently has more than 1M users who have engaged in more than 70M conversations.