Chatbots are intelligent conversational computer systems designed to mimic human conversation to enable automated online guidance and support. The increased benefits of chatbots led to their wide adoption by many industries in order to provide virtual assistance to customers. Chatbots utilise methods and algorithms from two Artificial Intelligence domains: Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. However, there are many challenges and limitations in their application. In this survey we review recent advances on chatbots, where Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language processing are used. We highlight the main challenges and limitations of current work and make recommendations for future research investigation.

In the twenty-first century, globalisation made corporate boundaries invisible and difficult to manage. This new macroeconomic transformation caused by globalisation introduced new challenges for critical infrastructure management. By replacing manual tasks with automated decision making and sophisticated technology, no doubt we feel much more secure than half a century ago. As the technological advancement takes root, so does the maturity of security threats. It is common that today’s critical infrastructures are operated by non-computer experts, e.g. nurses in health care, soldiers in military or firefighters in emergency services. In such challenging applications, protecting against insider attacks is often neither feasible nor economically possible, but these threats can be managed using suitable risk management strategies. Security technologies, e.g. firewalls, help protect data assets and computer systems against unauthorised entry. However, one area which is often largely ignored is the human factor of system security. Through social engineering techniques, malicious attackers are able to breach organisational security via people interactions. This paper presents a security awareness training framework, which can be used to train operators of critical infrastructure, on various social engineering security threats such as spear phishing, baiting, pretexting, among others.

Over the past decade, the digitization of services transformed the healthcare sector leading to a sharp rise in cybersecurity threats. Poor cybersecurity in the healthcare sector, coupled with high value of patient records attracted the attention of hackers. Sophisticated advanced persistent threats and malware have significantly contributed to increasing risks to the health sector. Many recent attacks are attributed to the spread of malicious software, e.g., ransomware or bot malware. Machines infected with bot malware can be used as tools for remote attack or even cryptomining. This paper presents a novel approach, called BotDet, for botnet Command and Control (C&C) traffic detection to defend against malware attacks in critical ultrastructure systems. There are two stages in the development of the proposed system: 1) we have developed four detection modules to detect different possible techniques used in botnet C&C communications and 2) we have designed a correlation framework to reduce the rate of false alarms raised by individual detection modules. Evaluation results show that BotDet balances the true positive rate and the false positive rate with 82.3% and 13.6%, respectively. Furthermore, it proves BotDet capability of real time detection.

Natural language processing problems (such as speech recognition, text-based data mining, and text or speech generation) are becoming increasingly important. Before effectively approaching many of these problems, it is necessary to process the syntactic structures of the sentences. Syntactic parsing is the task of constructing a syntactic parse tree over a sentence which describes the structure of the sentence. Parse trees are used as part of many language processing applications. In this paper, we present a multi-lingual dependency parser. Using advanced deep learning techniques, our parser architecture tackles common issues with parsing such as long-distance head attachment, while using ‘architecture engineering’ to adapt to each target language in order to reduce the feature engineering often required for parsing tasks. We implement a parser based on this architecture to utilize transfer learning techniques to address important issues related with limited-resourced language. We exceed the accuracy of state-of-the-art parsers on languages with limited training resources by a considerable margin. We present promising results for solving core problems in natural language parsing, while also performing at state-of-the-art accuracy on general parsing tasks.

Hate speech detection remains a significant challenge due to the nuanced and context-dependent nature of hateful language. Traditional classifiers, trained on specialized corpora, often struggle to accurately identify subtle or manipulated hate speech. This paper explores the potential of utilizing large language models (LLMs) to address these limitations. By leveraging their extensive training on diverse texts, LLMs demonstrate a superior ability to understand context, which is crucial for effective hate speech detection. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various LLMs on both binary and multi-label hate speech datasets to assess their performance. Our findings aim to clarify the extent to which LLMs can enhance hate speech classification accuracy, particularly in complex and challenging cases.