Hi This is probably an unsolvable problem, but still I am going to ask you out, maybe someone has an idea. I am thinking of making a new system for my IRC chatbot. The old one was a plain simple one which responded only when asked by his name. Now I want him to behave intelligently :) only respond if the sentence is addressed directly to him, or if he has something to say about it. Here is an example: No problem here:

Quote:

<user1> Hi <bot> Hello <user1> How are you ? <bot> Thank you. I am fine.

But what about this:

Quote:

<user1> I am so drunk today :( <user1> I got one nasty headache <bot> Get an aspirin then :)

The bot here actually knows to what phrase to respond, and how to do that correctly. The problem itself: 1. How to make this system, completely language independent. 2. Learning new words, phrases and responses from users chatting (this is the hardest part for now - How to get the idea to what phrase the response is written) So what do you think ?

a) Use Prolog. You can interface with C/C++ for the IRC connection.
b) Train it like any other person learning a language. Talk to it, if the response that it gives you is misplaced or irrelevant, give it negative feedback somehow and positive feedback when it does well. Of course, this is going to take a while and you'll still need to find a way of weighting responses in terms of their relevance to specific questions and subjects, etc.

The easy way would be to have preprogrammed responses attached to keywords with a probability. If you want novel sentences that don't necessarily make sense, you could use Markov chains or something similar to assemble sentences from a data base of words or phrases. See Mark V Shaney

What about the training how is it possible to train anything if you don't know to whom the question is related and to what question the response is made . This is the problem I am struggling with.

If we have 10 or more users on the IRC channel , and everyone is talking, How is it possible to teach a bot ? I don't really know :(

Someone is currently writing a pretty nice chatbot on gamedev. I can't remember who it was tough...

jfclavette - That would probably be me and my team :-)

DMINATOR - You'd like to see S12, after i've gotten her finished.

<me>Hi
<s12>Hello
<me>How are ya?
<s12>Fine, you?
<me>good
<s12>Nice :-)
<me>Meh. Hear about the football?
<s12>Meh.
<me>Tigers won!
<s12>W00t!
<me>Bie
<s12>k, bi!

:-)

Currently she's in a very simple form, using AIML and a keyword responce matrix, all i need is some more training. I'm also working on her context mechanism. Thats what lets her talk to people in a channell without them needing a codeword, ect.

I probably won't have any more dev time for the next two months or so. (tho i might be able to put in some work from time to time).

We could always use another member for the project :-)

I could teach you how she works pretty quickly if we could chat for a bit... Email me.

Amadscientist10@hotmail.com

From,
Nice coder

Great I am also very limited with time: colegge , other project , I can only spare a 1,5 * 3 hours for coding on my C++ lessons per week max. Anyway I will drop you email, let's see what we can figure out.

go for the learning approuch ( stay away from AIML :) )

i was thinking about making a chatbot that learns a language by just looking at the array of characters it is sent. so it would have to figure for itself that words are seperated with a ' ' character for example. Never got round to start though. i wanna finish my emulator first

An Ode to Fuzzy Logic

Fuzzy Logic,
Logic so Warm and Fuzzy,
how fuzzy is your navel,
how fuzzy is your brain?

Oh when I think of all the rules,
neither crisp nor sharp,
that neither algorithm nor formalism,
can dissect into a simple plan.

Fuzzy Logic,
how fuzzy are you?
probabilites are just a part of the plan.
When at last, we understand,
that Chaos is part of the master plan.

Fuzzy, fuzzy logic.

Quote:

Original post by DMINATOR If we have 10 or more users on the IRC channel , and everyone is talking, How is it possible to teach a bot ? I don't really know :(

The bot would have to be able to distinguish between users. One way to train it with responses would be to allow you to speak through the bot and have it learn from what you say.