Chat Bots

Ruta Mehta
Mugdha Jain
Welcome to the Jeetendra Mirchandani
world of living
people and artificial
intelligence entities
called bots!
Questions Well Answer
A Chat Bot
What is it? Who wants it? Why?
Since when is it around?
How does it work?
How do you test it?
Can it answer all my questions?
Can I make one of my own?
Where can I put it to work?
Introduction

Chat Bot: A computer program that can talk to humans in

natural language!
Uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to
represent knowledge.
Can replace a human for monotonous jobs of answering
queries, e.g. E-help desk.
How It All Started

Eliza the first chat bot made by Joseph Weizenbaum.

Eliza Effect
tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior
experience.
Working of Eliza is based on
Knowledge Representation
Pattern Recognition
Substitution of key words into known phrases.
How does it respond

Looks for certain patterns of words in the user's input.

Replies with pre-determined output, if the pattern is
matched.
Needs to have an idea of what the user will chat
Has suitable responses defined in the AIML file
Architecture of a Chat Bot

Responder

AIML Interpreter

AIML Objects

A Chat Bot
Knowledge Representation
Types of AIML objects
Topics
Categories
E.g. :
<aiml>
<topic name=the topic >
<category>
<pattern>PATTERN</pattern>
<that>THAT</that>
<template>TEMPLATE</template>
</category>
</topic>
</aiml>
Example AIML Object
<category>
AIML Object
<category> <pattern>YES</pattern>
<pattern>HELLO</pattern> <that>DO YOU LIKE MOVIES</that>
<template>Hi <template>What is your favorite
there!</template> movie?</template>
</category> </category>

Chat Sequence Chat Bot: Do you like Movies?

User: Hello! User: Yes
Chat Bot: Hi There!
Chat Bot: What is your favorite
movie
Topics and Categories

Topic: an optional top-level element that contains category

elements
Category: consists of an input question (pattern) and an
output answer (template)
Types of Categories
Atomic Category
Default Category
Recursive Category
Atomic Category

Contains patterns that does not have wildcards

* or _.
Example: <category>
<pattern>10 DOLLARS</pattern>
<template> wow, what a cheap </template>
</category>

Conversation:
User: This watch is for 10 dollars
Chat Bot: Wow, what a cheap watch!
Default Category

Contains patterns that have wildcards * or _.

Example:
<category>
<pattern>10 *</pattern>
<template> It is ten.</template>
</category>

Conversation:
User: 10 dollars.
Chat Bot: It is ten.
Recursive category
Template calls the pattern matcher recursively
Uses <srai> tag, that stands for symbolic recursion artificial
intelligence
For example,
In English there are different ways to ask about X:
Describe x?
Tell me about X?
Do you know what X is?
The knowledge is stored in the simplest way.
Whatever the question is, it will be reduced to category like <What is>.
Input normalization

Substitution normalizations
Abbreviations such as "Mr." may be spelled out as "Mister" to avoid
sentence-splitting at the period in the abbreviated form.
Sentence-splitting normalizations
Rule: break sentences at periods. It relies upon substitutions performed
in the substitution phase.
Pattern-fitting normalizations
Remove all characters that are not normal characters; like converting
lowercase letters to uppercase .
Example
<category> <category>
<pattern>HELLO</pattern> <pattern>WHAT IS 2 *</pattern>
<template> <random> <template><random>
<li>Well hello there!</li> <li>Two.</li>
<li>Hi there!</li> <li>Four.</li>
<li>Hi there. I was just wanting <li>Six.</li>
to talk</li>
<li>12.</li>
<li>Hello there !</li>
</random></template></category
</random></template></category> >
<category> <category>
<pattern>_ WHAT IS 2 AND <pattern>HALO</pattern>
2</pattern>
<template>
<template>
<srai>HELLO</srai>
<sr/><srai>WHAT IS 2 AND
2</srai> </template>
</template> </category>
</category>
 Question : Halo, What is 2 and 2

_ What is 2 and 2

</sr>
<srai> WHAT IS 2 AND 2 </srai>
HALO
WHAT IS 2 AND *
HELLO
WHAT IS 2 *
Well hello there!
Hi there! Two
Hi there. I was just Four
wanting to talk. Six
Hello there ! 12

Answer : Hi There! Six

Graph-master an example
interpreter

AIML interpreter: tries to match word by word to obtain the

largest pattern matching which is the best one.
Graph-master: an interpreter that models this behavior
Contains a set of nodes called Node-mappers .
Node-Mappers : map branches from each node where
branches represent the first words of all patterns.
Each leaf node contains a template.
Flowchart for Pattern Matching

yes
Search sub-graph Try all remaining
Node-mapper yes
rooted at child suffixes of input Match?
Contains _?
node linked by _ following X
no
no

Search sub-graph
Node-mapper yes rooted at child yes
Match?
Contains X? node linked by X
using input tail
no no

yes Search sub-graph Try all remaining

Node-mapper yes
rooted at child suffixes of input Match?
Contains *?
node linked by * following X
Some Observations

Priority order at every node:

_ wildcard, followed by
an atomic word, followed by
* wildcard .
Patterns need not be ordered alphabetically
The matching is word-by-word, not category-by-
category
Highly restricted form of depth-first search
Turing Test

Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test as a replacement for

the question Can machines think?
Turing's aim is to provide a method to assess whether or not a
machine can think.
The test
A man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) chat.
The objective of the interrogator is to determine which of the other
two is the woman
If a machine (bot) chats instead of A or B and fools the interrogator, it
has passed the Turing test.
Can It Answer All My Questions?

A Chat Bot has a limited number of patterns and responses.

The AIML structure supports regular expressions
In AIML, you can define recursive categories.
The bot may sometimes give funny replies, but that depends
on the AIML spec, i.e. Its brain!
How to build a bot of your own

Components An AIML Object Spec, AIML interpreter, and

a responder!
A Chat Bot represents and models a character.
The brain is the AIML file, that defines patterns and
corresponding replies
A bot can be trained to be an Expert System about a special
theme large data!
Training data Yahoo Chat!
What is a Chat Bot useful for?

Commercial chatter bots to help customers

At web-shops and e-commerce sites.
Bots to receive complaints from users, online
An interactive (talking) encyclopedia.
Chatter bots administrating IRC-channels and Hotline server.
The Psychiatrist the famous pronoun reversal trick
Starship Titanic, a game created by the famous writer
Douglas Adams along with Terry Jones
Questions We Answered
A Chat Bot
What is it? Who wants it? Why?
Since when is it around?
How does it work?
How do you test it?
Can it answer all my questions?
Can I make one of my own?
Where can I put it to work?
Clarifications
How powerful is JavaCC-built parser?
As long as one can use JavaCC's look-ahead specification to guide the
parsing where the LL(1) rules are not sufficient, JavaCC can handle any
grammar that is not left-recursive.
Powerful than a yacc generated parser?
AIML is connected to a system that allows for learning new patterns and
putting them into a context
Context sensitive
Learning ?
Dialogue Corpora can be used to train a Chatbot! (See References)
Intelligent?
Even Turing tests have different levels and yet cannot finally decide
whether the system is intelligent or not. Nowadays a system is considered
to be intelligent if it is able to mimic intelligent behaviour (e.g. within a
specified domain).
Thank You
 References

The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E.: Dr. Richard S. Wallace,

http://www.alicebot.org/anatomy.html
Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), A.L.I.C.E. AI
Foundation, http://alicebot.org/TR/2001/WD-aiml/
AIML Interpreter Overview 2004, http://www.aimlbots.com/en/aiml-
interpreters.html
Computing machinery and intelligence, Alan Turing [1950],
http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm
Using Dialogue Corpora to Train a Chatbot (Bayan Abu Shawar, Eric
Atwell)
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/andyr/research/papers/techreport2003_02.pdf
Project Proposal

Extension to Chat Bot, that will reply emails

Will maintain a chat session in terms of email-session-id
Can be useful for auto replying to emails that have a
common reply, related to the question in the email
e.g. help@cse - email to register your complaints!