A chatbot (originally chatterbot)[1] is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations.[2][3][4] Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of maintaining a conversation with a user in natural language and simulating the way a human would behave as a conversational partner. Such chatbots often use deep learning and natural language processing, but simpler chatbots have existed for decades.
Although chatbots have existed since the late 1960s, the field gained widespread attention in the early 2020s due to the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT,[5][6] followed by alternatives such as Microsoft's Copilot, DeepSeek and Google's Gemini.[7] Such examples reflect the recent practice of basing such products upon broad foundational large language models, such as GPT-4 or the Gemini language model, that get fine-tuned so as to target specific tasks or applications (i.e., simulating human conversation, in the case of chatbots). Chatbots can also be designed or customized to further target even more specific situations and/or particular subject-matter domains.
A major area where chatbots have long been used is in customer service and support, with various sorts of virtual assistants.Companies spanning a wide range of industries have begun using the latest generative artificial intelligence technologies to power more advanced developments in such areas.
BERT was pre-trained simultaneously on two tasks.[10]
Masked Language Model (MLM): In this task, BERT randomly masks some words in a sentence and tries to predict the original words that were masked. For example, in the sentence "The cat sat on the [MASK]," BERT would need to predict "mat." This helps BERT learn bidirectional context, meaning it understands the relationships between words not just from left to right or right to left but from both directions at the same time.
Next Sentence Prediction (NSP): In this task, BERT is trained to predict whether one sentence logically follows another. For example, given two sentences, "The cat sat on the mat." and "It was a sunny day," BERT has to decide if the second sentence is a valid continuation of the first one. This helps BERT understand relationships between sentences, which is important for tasks like question answering or document classification.
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