Friday, August 26, 2011

How to start implementing an AIML based chatterbot?

Hi everyone, long time...:), here goes my long awaited post.
First of all my apologies for the delay, for anybody who visited this blog in search for information on chatterbot development.
So, I am here again and this time I promise to make this a series of posts to describe the development of AIML chatterbot on .NET platform.
Actually this was my basic idea of the final year project, which I developed with enhanced features.
If you are new to chatbot development and reading this post, you know how helpful it is , if there is some help on the Internet for the chatter bot development for beginners. The communities who shares their knowledge with the world helped me in order to 
search the needed facts and the ways of development, and some forums helped me a lot for the clarification of my doubts.
I was so lucky to have a great supervisor and assessor for the guidance of my final year project, who helped me a lot in order to make it a success.
Therefore, I dedicate these posts to all who helped me with the project from all over the world.


Today, lets talk about how to get started on the chatter bot.
OK, you have the idea of "I need to develop a chatterbot " in your head, but how? 
Other questions in your mind would be 
Where can I get the needed information?
How do I start?
Where do I start?
What are the available methods?
Is there anybody to help me with the clarifications?


The same questions I had when I started my project, and I did succeed, so you all can do it...:)


Yes, of course you will want to search with the help of Google and other search engines. But you would not know where is the best place to start on?
First you must get the idea of what is a chatter bot? A little peep in to the history would be great, and it is interesting too.(Turing tests)
How a chatter bot works in brief?
What are the methods that are already there?(If you are a research student you would want to compare and contrast)
How to start implementing?


In my coming posts, I am only going to describe the implementation of a web based  chatter bot with AIML on .NET platform. But if you are interested in using different
technologies or platforms, there is help too on the Internet, so go ahead , no problems...:)


For a research beginner who is in seek for information,the following are the links that are good according to my opinion and for the others who like background reading. I am not going to describe theories and concepts in my blog. The following links will guide you through all those.


What is a chat bot?
For the researchers the best research papers would be:
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA
A Comparison Between Alice and Elizabeth Chatbot Systems


Other useful links :
From Eliza to ALICE


The best forums :
ALICE AI Foundation Forum
Chatbots.org forum


With the next post, I am going to discuss about AIML.
See you all soon. Bye for now!