Chatbots are on the rise, but what are they and why is everyone talking about (and to) them? Facebook is widely expected to launch an app store for chatbots at its developer conference this week. Meanwhile, Microsoft has described chatbots as the "new apps" with chief executive Satya Nadella saying that they "unlock conversation as a platform". The BBC "created" its own one-off chatbot to answer some of the burning questions you may have about this latest technology. What can I help you with Jane?

Yesterday, news emerged that Google was using a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called "RankBrain" to help sort through its search results. Wondering how that works and fits in with Google's overall ranking system? Here's what we know about RankBrain. The information covered below comes from three sources. First, the Bloomberg story that broke the news about RankBrain yesterday (see also our write-up of it).

This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FINDER retrieves existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ FINDER uses a semantic knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We include results from an evaluation of the system's performance and show that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach.