Quarteroni, Silvia2018-04-132018-04-132018https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/16423Recently, natural language processing applications have become very popular in the industry. Examples of such applications include “semantic” enterprise search engines, document categorizers, speech recognizers and – last but not least – conversational agents, also known as virtual assistants or “chatbots”. The latter in particular are very sought-after in the customer care domain, where the aim is to complement the live agent experience with an artificial intelligence able to help users fulfil a task. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and limitations of industrial chatbot applications, with a particular focus on the “human-in-the-loop” aspect, whereby a cooperation between human and machine takes place in mutual interest. Furthermore, we analyse how the same aspect intervenes in other industrial natural language processing applications.enText/Journal Article10.1007/s00287-018-1094-11432-122X