Chatterbot

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A chatterbot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods. Though many appear to be intelligently interpreting the human input prior to providing a response, most chatterbots simply scan for keywords within the input and pull a reply with the most matching keywords or the most similar wording pattern from a local database. Chatterbots may also be referred to as chat bots or chatterboxes.

1 Method of operation
2 Early chatterbots
3 Advanced chatterbots
4 Malicious chatterbots
5 Chatterbots in modern AI
6 See also
7 External links

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Method of operation

A good understanding of a conversation is required to carry on a meaningful dialog but most chatterbots do not attempt this. Instead they attempt to pick up cue words or phrases from the person which will allow them to use pre-prepared or pre-calculated responses which can move the conversation on in an apparently meaningful way without requiring them to know what they are talking about.

For example (in imitation of ELIZA), if a human types, "I am feeling very worried lately," the chatterbot may be programmed to recognize the phrase "I am" and respond by replacing it with "Why are you" plus a question mark at the end, giving the answer, "Why are you feeling very worried lately?" A similar approach using keywords would be for the program to answer any comment including (Name of celebrity) with "I think they're great, don't you?" Humans, especially those unfamiliar with chatterbots, sometimes find the resulting conversations engaging. Critics of chatterbots call this engagement the ELIZA effect.

Some programs classified as chatterbots use other principles. One example is Jabberwacky, which attempts to model the way humans learn new facts and language. ELLA attempts to use natural language processing to make more useful responses from a human's input.

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Early chatterbots

The classic early chatterbots are ELIZA and PARRY. More recent programs are Racter, ALI, A.L.I.C.E., and ELLA.

The growth of chatterbots as a research field has created an expansion in their purposes. While ELIZA and PARRY were used exclusively to simulate typed conversation, Racter was used to "write" a story called The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed. ELLA includes a collection of games and functional features to further extend the potential of chatterbots.

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Advanced chatterbots

Advanced chatterbots like Jabberwock are combining several linguistic and Artificial intelligence methods like Fuzzy logic, Context-free grammar algorithm and Markov chain together with a Semantic network and classic Supervised learning and Pattern recognition. Using these techniques, the chatterbot is able to follow the subject of the conversation and to generate most of the replies on the fly instead of looking for a best match in a database. The multi-faceted approach was pioneered by Robby Garner with his program, Albert one.

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Malicious chatterbots

Malicious chatterbots are frequently used to fill chat rooms with spam and advertising, or to entice people into revealing personal information, such as bank account numbers.

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Chatterbots in modern AI

Modern AI research focuses on practical engineering tasks. This is known as weak AI and is distiniguished from strong AI, which would have sapience and reasoning abilities.

There are several fields of AI, one of which is natural language. Many weak AI fields have specialised software or programming languages created for them. For example, one of the 'most-human' natural language chatterbots, A.L.I.C.E., uses a programming language AIML that is specific to its program, and the various clones, named Alicebots. Nevertheless, A.L.I.C.E. is still based on pattern matching without any reasoning. This is the same technique Eliza, the first chatterbot, was using back in 1966. Jabberwacky is a little closer to strong AI, since it learns how to converse from the ground up based solely on user interactions. In spite of that, the result is still fairly poor, and it is reasonable to state that there is actually no general purpose conversational artificial intelligence.

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