A Malay Chatterbot

Chatterbots are computer programs that simulate intelligent conversation. Theymake use of various techniques such as pattern matching, indexing, sentence reconstruction, and even natural language processing. In this paper, the author presents an approach to develop a chatterbot, A Malay-Intelligence Response Application (A.M.I.R.A) that will be able to communicate or converse in Bahasa Melayu. The right combination of algorithms and techniques need to be identified so that the Malay Chatterbot should be able to response to the user query in Bahasa Melayu with the right grammar and the right arrangement of sentences. This is to make sure that A.M.I.R.A will still following the famous idea of the "imitation game" (Turing, 1950), which chatterbots are developed with the aim of fooling (at least temporarily) a human into thinking they are talking to another person. RAD has been selected to be the development methodology for the project. The chatterbot will be developed using AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) which is an XML specification for programming chat robots. AIML is open source software, a great advantage for the project since the software can be freely used and, if necessary, modified. The simplicity of AIML makes it easy for non-programmers, especially those who already knowHTML, to get started writing chat robots

Survey on Chatbot Design Techniques in Speech Conversation Systems

Human-Computer Speech is gaining momentum as a technique of computer interaction. There has been a recent upsurge in speech based search engines and assistants such as Siri, Google Chrome and Cortana. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as NLTK for Python can be applied to analyse speech, and intelligent responses can be found by designing an engine to provide appropriate human like responses. This type of programme is called a Chatbot, which is the focus of this study. This paper presents a survey on the techniques used to design Chatbots and a comparison is made between different design techniques from nine carefully selected papers according to the main methods adopted. These papers are representative of the significant improvements in Chatbots in the last decade. The paper discusses the similarities and differences in the techniques and examines in particular the Loebner prize-winning Chatbots

Agentes Conversacionais: Desenvolvimento de uma Aplicação no Museu Virtual para o Ensino de Computação / Conversational Agents: Development of an Application in the Virtual Museum for Teaching Computing

Mundos Virtuais 3D são espaços em que os estudantes de Licenciatura em Computação podem ter o apoio de agentes de software para simulação de avatares na realização de tarefas. A contribuição deste artigo é a agregação de conhecimento e a conversação do bot, que se comunique com os estudantes por meio de uma linguagem natural. Com este objetivo, usamos da linguagem AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) para nos permitir realizar algumas conversas precisas sobre o ensino de introdução à computação. Nessa proposta avaliamos a usabilidade do agente conversacional em um Museu Virtual 3D. Os resultados mostram a abordagem da conversação e apresenta uma maior satisfação do estudante utilizando a inteligência do bot.

A Malay Chatterbot

Chatterbots are computer programs that simulate intelligent conversation. Theymake use of various techniques such as pattern matching, indexing, sentence reconstruction, and even natural language processing. In this paper, the author presents an approach to develop a chatterbot, A Malay-Intelligence Response Application (A.M.I.R.A) that will be able to communicate or converse in Bahasa Melayu. The right combination of algorithms and techniques need to be identified so that the Malay Chatterbot should be able to response to the user query in Bahasa Melayu with the right grammar and the right arrangement of sentences. This is to make sure that A.M.I.R.A will still following the famous idea of the "imitation game" (Turing, 1950), which chatterbots are developed with the aim of fooling (at least temporarily) a human into thinking they are talking to another person. RAD has been selected to be the development methodology for the project. The chatterbot will be developed using AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) which is an XML specification for programming chat robots. AIML is open source software, a great advantage for the project since the software can be freely used and, if necessary, modified. The simplicity of AIML makes it easy for non-programmers, especially those who already knowHTML, to get started writing chat robots

Modelling and Animation using Partial Differential Equations. Geometric modelling and computer animation of virtual characters using elliptic partial differential equations.

This work addresses various applications pertaining to the design, modelling and animation of parametric surfaces using elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDE) which are produced via the PDE method. Compared with traditional surface generation techniques, the PDE method is an effective technique that can represent complex three-dimensional (3D) geometries in terms of a relatively small set of parameters. A PDE-based surface can be produced from a set of pre-configured curves that are used as the boundary conditions to solve a number of PDE. An important advantage of using this method is that most of the information required to define a surface is contained at its boundary. Thus, complex surfaces can be computed using only a small set of design parameters. In order to exploit the advantages of this methodology various applications were developed that vary from the interactive design of aircraft configurations to the animation of facial expressions in a computer-human interaction system that utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) bot for real time conversation. Additional applications of generating cyclic motions for PDE based human character integrated in a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) package as well as developing techniques to describe a given mesh geometry by a set of boundary conditions, required to evaluate the PDE method, are presented. Each methodology presents a novel approach for interacting with parametric surfaces obtained by the PDE method. This is due to the several advantages this surface generation technique has to offer. Additionally, each application developed in this thesis focuses on a specific target that delivers efficiently various operations in the design, modelling and animation of such surfaces.The project files will not be available online

Avaliação de agentes de conversação : a influência de elementos multimédia

Tese de mestrado. Multimédia. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Customisable chatbot as a research instrument

Abstract. Chatbots are proliferating rapidly online for a variety of different purposes. This thesis presents a customisable chatbot that was designed and developed as a research instrument for online customer interaction research. The developed chatbot facilitates creation of different bot personas, data management tools, and a fully functional online chat user interface. Customer-facing bots in the system are rulebased, with basic input processing and text response selection based on best match. The system uses its own database to store user-chatbot dialogue history. Further, bots can be assigned unique dialogue scripts and their profiles can be customised concerning name, description and profile image. In the presented validation studies, participants completed a task by taking part in a conversation with different bots, as hosted by the system and invoked through distinct URL parameters. Second, the participants filled in a questionnaire on their experience with the bot, designed to reveal differences in how the bots were perceived. Our results suggest that the chatbot’s personality impacted how customers experienced the interactions. Therefore, the developed system can facilitate research scenarios that deal with investigating participant responses to different chatbot personas. Future work is necessary for a wider range of applications and enhanced response control.Personoitava chatbot tutkimustyökaluna. Tiivistelmä. Chatbotit yleistyvät nopeasti Internetissä ja niitä käytetään enenevissä määrin useissa eri käyttötarkoituksissa. Tämä diplomityö esittelee personoitavan chatbotin, joka on kehitetty tutkimustyökaluksi verkon yli tapahtuvaan vuorovaikutustutkimukseen. Kehitetty chatbot sisältää erilaisten bottipersoonien luonnin, apuvälineitä datan käsittelyn, ja itse botin käyttöliittymän. Järjestelmän käyttäjille vastailevat bottipersoonat ovat sääntöihin perustuvia, niiden syötteet käsitellään suoraviivaisesti ja vastaukseksi valitaan vertailun mukaan paras ennaltamääritellyn skriptin mukaisesti. Järjestelmä käyttää omaa tietokantaa tallentamaan käyttäjä-botti keskusteluhistorian. Lisäksi boteille voidaan asettaa uniikki dialogimalli, ja niiden profiilista voidaan personoida URL-parametrillä nimi, botin kuvaus ja profiilikuva. Chatbotin tekninen toiminta todettiin tutkimuksella, jossa osallistujat suorittivat annetun tehtävän seuraamalla osittain valmista käsikirjoitusta eri bottien kanssa. Tämän jälkeen osallistujat täyttivät käyttäjäkyselyn liittyen heidän kokemukseensa botin kanssa. Kysely oli suunniteltu paljastamaan mahdolliset eroavaisuudet siinä, kuinka botin käyttäytyminen miellettiin keskustelun aikana. Käyttäjätestin tulokset viittaavat siihen, että chatbotin persoonalla oli vaikutus käyttäjien kokemukseen. Kehitetty järjestelmä siis pystyy mahdollistamaan tutkimusasetelmia, joissa tutkitaan osallistujien reaktioita erilaisten chattibottien persooniin. Jatkotyö kehitetyn chatbotin yhteydessä keskittyy monimutkaisempien käyttötarkoitusten lisäämiseen ja botin vastausten parantamiseen edistyksellisemmän luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn avulla