ALICE Chatbot: Trials and Outputs

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Abstract

Abstract A chatbot is a conversational agent that interacts with users using natural language. Multi chatbots are available to serve in different domains. However, the knowledge base of chatbots is hand coded in its brain. This paper presents an overview of ALICE chatbot, its AIML format, and our experiments to generate different prototypes of ALICE automatically based on a corpus approach. A description of developed software which converts readable text (corpus) into AIML format is presented alongside with describing the different corpora we used. Our trials revealed the possibility of generating useful prototypes without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or complex machine learning techniques. These prototypes were used as tools to practice different languages, to visualize corpus, and to provide answers for questions.

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Using corpora in machine-learning chatbot systems

Bayan Shawar, Eric Steven Atwell (2005)

A chatbot is a machine conversation system which interacts with human users via natural conversational language. Software to machine-learn conversational patterns from a transcribed dialogue corpus has been used to generate a range of chatbots speaking various languages and sublanguages including varieties of English, as well as French, Arabic and Afrikaans. This paper presents a program to learn from spoken transcripts of the Dialogue Diversity Corpus of English, the Minnesota French Corpus, the Corpus of Spoken Afrikaans, the Qur'an Arabic-English parallel corpus, and the British National Corpus of English; we discuss the problems which arose during learning and testing. Two main goals were achieved from the automation process. One was the ability to generate different versions of the chatbot in different languages, bringing chatbot technology to languages with few if any NLP resources: the corpus-based learning techniques transferred straightforwardly to develop chatbots for Afrikaans and Qur'anic Arabic. The second achievement was the ability to learn a very large number of categories within a short time, saving effort and errors in doing such work manually: we generated more than one million AIML categories or conversation-rules from the BNC corpus, 20 times the size of existing AIML rule-sets, and probably the biggest AI Knowledge-Base ever.