Keyword chatbot

2007-10-07 chatbot nlp

Something I've wanted to do for a couple of years now is a sort of online chatbot framework thing. In other words, this would be a testbed for different language analysis techniques that could be played with online and tested against real people.

An extension would be to connect a given chatbot to some other chatbot out there somewhere, and see them talk to each other. That could be fun.

The basic framework for this kind of venture could be pretty simple, but could, of course, end up arbitrarily complex. You'd need some kind of principled semantic framework (which would start at a simple box with words in it and ramify through increasingly sophisticated syntactic and semantic analyses -- the idea is to have a framework which can support both simplistic single-word pattern matching to select a response, or use sentence frames to extract some subject patterns to be manipulated in the response, right up through a hypothetical Turing-complete NLP parser.)

The session would contain a list of facts and "stuff" which corresponds to the, I dunno, dialog memory of a conversation. There could optionally be some kind of database memory of earlier conversations with a given contact. Again, this would run the gamut from simple named strings to be substituted into a response pattern, to complete semantic structures of unknown nature, which would be used to generate more sophisticated conversation.

Then the third and final component would be the definition of a chatbot itself. This would consist of a set of responses to given situations (a situation being the current string incoming plus whatever semantic structure has been accumulated during the course of the conversation.) There could be a spontaneity "response", i.e. something new said after some period of time without an answer from the other. Again -- it should be possible to start small and stupid, with simple word patterns, random-response lists, and the like, and build upwards to more complicated semantics.

The ability to detect and switch languages would be of great use, of course, and there should be some kind of facility for that as well.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to build a chatbot for language practice in, say, Klingon or Láadan? I mean, how else could you reasonably practice a constructed language?

Anyway, when I have time, I'll certainly be doing something with this idea. Any year now, yessir, any year.







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