That’s an interesting use case—chatbots for customer self-service and real-time agent assistance, plus summarization of customer service

calls.
Here’s how I’d approach it with current technology:

1. Customer-Facing Chatbot (Self-Service)

LLM Choice: Use an instruction-tuned model like GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini Pro, fine-tuned on domain-specific data (home equity loans, financial
regulations). For a chatbot → Gemini Pro (or Gemini Ultra, when available)
Either fine tuning OR RAG OR both. These are alternatives to each other.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Connect the chatbot to a document retrieval system (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, or a vector database on
GCP's Vertex AI) to fetch accurate, real-time information from company policy documents and FAQs.
Fine tune using LoRA inside hugging face. It's from a package called PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning)
Keeps base model frozen and trains small adapter layers.
Give it structured training data.
{"input": "Customer: How do I qualify for a HELOC?", "output": "Agent: You typically need a credit score of 620+, sufficient home equity,
and proof of income."}
For RAG:
Generate embeddings: Use a model (like textembedding-gecko@latest from Vertex AI or OpenAI's embedding models) to convert text
into vectors.
Store embeddings: Save them in Vertex AI Matching Engine (or alternatives like BigQuery vector search). This is faster than BigQuery and
better for real time responses.
Search efficiently: When a user asks a question, convert it into an embedding and find the closest stored responses.
Application Assistance: If the chatbot helps with applications, integrate it with backend APIs to retrieve customer data, prefill forms, and guide
users through eligibility checks.
Compliance & Guardrails: Use prompt engineering and filtering to ensure it doesn’t provide misleading financial advice.

2. Real-Time Agent Assistance (Speech-to-Text + Response Suggestions)

Speech-to-Text: Use a real-time ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) model like Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, Deepgram, or Whisper for
transcribing customer calls.
For a chatbot → Gemini Pro (or Gemini Ultra, when available)
Intent Recognition: Apply a fine-tuned LLM (or a smaller model like T5 or DistilBERT) to extract intent and key entities from the conversation.
1. Zero-Shot or Few-Shot Intent Recognition (LLM as Classifier)
You define a list of possible intents (e.g., "apply for loan," "check loan status," "speak to agent").
You pass a user query and the intent list to an LLM like Gemini Pro in a prompt.
The LLM returns the best-matching intent.
Classify the following user query into one of these intents:
 ["apply for loan", "check loan status", "speak to agent", "ask about fees"]
User query: "How do I start my home equity loan application?"
Intent: apply for loan
2. Fine-Tuning an LLM for Intent Classification
{"text": "I want to know my loan balance", "intent": "check loan status"}
{"text": "How much will my monthly payment be?", "intent": "ask about fees"}
3. Hybrid Approach: LLM + Vector Search (RAG)
Store past user queries & their intents in Vertex AI Matching Engine (vector database).
Convert a new user query into an embedding and find the closest past query.
Use similarity search to determine the intent.
User asks: "Can I increase my loan limit?"
Convert to embedding and search in vector DB.
Find similar query: "How do I request a loan increase?" → mapped to "modify loan".
Response Suggestion: Build a response generation system based on:
A retrieval-based component (predefined responses for common queries).
A generative model (e.g., a fine-tuned LLaMA or GPT model) that refines the suggestions.
Latency Optimization: Since this must run in real-time, use a lightweight model hosted on Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock, or a local deployment
with optimized inference (e.g., quantized LLMs using vLLM or TensorRT-optimized models).
Use a lightweight model, batch your queries together and send them to get a faster response, use faster TPUs, do quantization
and pruning of your model

3. Conversation Summarization
Model Choice: Use a summarization model like PEGASUS, BART, or GPT-4-turbo.
For summarization → FLAN-T5 or Gemini Pro. FLAN-T5 (lighter, more efficient for cost-sensitive applications). Gemini Pro (better
performance for longer conversations).
Pipeline:
Transcript Cleaning: Remove filler words, false starts, etc.
Chunking for Long Calls: Use a sliding window approach if the call is longer than the token limit.
This would be kind of a mess b/c you have to chunk, then do an overlapping chunk, summarize each one, and concatenate, then get the
model to take that concatenation and summarize THAT to make it make sense. Could end up redundant or missing the overarching
meaning.
You can also add as you go like start with the first chunk’s summary and feed that into the model as part of the context for the second
chunk’s summary request, then build up over time.
Summarization Strategy: Use extractive summarization for factual accuracy (e.g., keyword extraction with embeddings) and abstractive
summarization for readability.
Compliance & Sentiment Analysis: Add an extra step for detecting tone, key customer concerns, and compliance risks.

Deployment & Scaling

GCP Stack:
Vertex AI for model hosting.
Cloud Functions or Cloud Run for inference endpoints.
BigQuery for storing conversation logs and analytics.
Firestore for real-time chatbot state management.

Evaluation Methods
Chatbot:
Response accuracy – how many of the classifications did it get right
Intent recognition accuracy – how many intents did it get right
Generated response or summary – BLEU or ROUGE to compare to human responses
Ask users in survey, check if they engage again with bot
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is related to NLP in several ways, particularly in areas where models need to generate or refine outputs based on
feedback rather than direct supervision. Some key applications include:

1. Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs)

o RL is used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to fine-tune LLMs like ChatGPT. Human annotators rate
model outputs, and these ratings train a reward model, which is then used to guide further training via reinforcement learning
(e.g., Proximal Policy Optimization, PPO).
o This helps improve coherence, factual accuracy, and alignment with user preferences.
2. Dialogue Systems and Chatbots
o RL can optimize chatbot responses based on long-term conversational goals (e.g., engagement, user satisfaction) rather than just
predicting the next token.
o Models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or DeepMind’s Sparrow use RL to improve user interactions.
3. Text Generation and Summarization
o Traditional NLP models (like seq2seq transformers) are trained with teacher forcing, which can lead to exposure bias. RL can
help mitigate this by optimizing directly for final output quality using rewards.
o It helps generate summaries that optimize for readability, coherence, or factual accuracy.
4. Machine Translation
o Instead of relying only on cross-entropy loss, RL can optimize translation quality based on BLEU, METEOR, or human preference
signals.
5. Information Retrieval and Search Ranking
o RL helps optimize search engine ranking models by learning from user click-through rates and engagement.
6. Text-based Games and Interactive AI
o RL is used in NLP models that interact with environments, such as AI playing text-based games, learning from rewards based on
game progress.
An objective function is the function that a machine learning model tries to optimize during training. It measures how well the model is
performing and guides the learning process by providing a way to update model parameters.

Types of Objective Functions

1. Loss Function (Minimization)

o In supervised learning, models minimize a loss function that quantifies the difference between predicted and actual outputs.
o Examples:
 Mean Squared Error (MSE) for regression
 Cross-Entropy Loss for classification

2. Reward Function (Maximization)

o In reinforcement learning, models maximize a reward function that represents long-term success.

Objective Function in PPO

PPO's objective function balances maximizing rewards while keeping policy updates stable:

 This function optimizes rewards while avoiding drastic changes to the policy.
Graph-based NLP techniques represent linguistic structures as graphs and apply graph algorithms or neural networks to analyze text. These
methods are useful for tasks where relationships between words, sentences, or documents matter.

Types of Graph-Based NLP Techniques

1. Text as a Graph Representation

Graphs can model:

 Words (nodes) connected by co-occurrence (edges) in a sentence or document.

 Sentences as nodes, linked by semantic similarity.
 Entities as nodes in a knowledge graph.

2. Common Graph-Based NLP Methods

A. Graph-Based Text Representation & Ranking

Used for summarization, keyword extraction, and search.

 TextRank (similar to PageRank)

o Builds a graph where words or sentences are nodes.
o Edges represent word co-occurrence or semantic similarity.
o A ranking algorithm assigns importance scores to nodes.
o Used in unsupervised extractive summarization.

🔹 Example: In keyword extraction, words that co-occur frequently form a graph. The most "central" words (highly connected) are
extracted as keywords.

B. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for NLP

 Models like Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) or Graph Attention Networks (GAT) process NLP graphs.
 Used in relation extraction, document classification, and entity linking.
 Example: A GNN-based citation network classifies research papers by linking them in a graph.
C. Knowledge Graphs

 Represent entities and relations in a structured format.

 Example: Wikidata, ConceptNet, WordNet store knowledge as graphs.
 Used in question answering, entity linking, and semantic search.

D. Syntactic & Dependency Parsing with Graphs

 Sentences can be converted into dependency trees (a type of directed graph).

 Graph-based dependency parsing assigns edges between words to capture grammatical structure.
 Example: In "She loves NLP," a dependency graph links "She" → "loves" → "NLP."

3. Applications of Graph-Based NLP

 Summarization – TextRank for extractive summarization.

 Keyword Extraction – Identify key terms in documents.
 Relation Extraction – Extract relationships between entities.
 Document Classification – Graph-based representations improve accuracy.
 Entity Linking – Connect mentions to knowledge graphs.
 Machine Translation – Graph models enhance translation by capturing relationships between words.