A Tutorial For Adding Knowledge to Your Robot

Notes

[1]
The options Standard AIML Sept 2001 and Dr Wallace's A.L.I.C.E march 2002 are two sets of knowledge. The first is organized into separate files that are easy to change - it's suitable for experts. The second is the knowledge Dr. Wallace used to win the 2002 Loebner prize.


[2]
Words inside brackets "<" and ">" like "<random>" are called XML tags and specify how the answer is to be processed. We've provided only a few such tags. <li> specifies an element in a list - and this example has a list with 3 elements - namely the three sentences. Each tag is expected to have a closing tag, typically specified as in </random>. It sometimes happens that nothing falls between an opening tag and a closing tag, and so the two tags can be replaced as in this example <star></star> = <star/> That is, the two tags on the right can be replaced by the simpler tag on the left.


[3]
Changes you make directly to the robot's AIML files will be immediately visible within the Training Interface. However, if your robot is published, you'll need to re-publish the robot in order to have the changes be visible at the public URL.


[4]
XML and AIML are programming languages. We implemented AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) a non-standard evolving markup language for creating chat robots, created and supported by the ALICE Foundation and located at www.alicebot.org. The primary design feature of AIML is brevity and simplicity. The pattern matching language is very simple, for example permitting only one wild-card ('*') match character per pattern. AIML is an XML language, meaning that it obeys certain grammatical meta-rules. The choice of XML syntax permits integration with other tools such as XML editors.


[5]
Here are more details of the transformation. The inquiry "do you love me", is transformed, removing any punctuation and converting it to upper case: "DO YOU LOVE ME". So "do you LOVE me" and "DO YOU love me" are equivalent. For multiple sentences, finding the sentences is the first part. The inquiry "Do you love me dr.wallace? ms.mary said you might..." is transformed to "Do you love me doctor wallace? ms mary said you might". Then each sentence is separately processed. Apostrophes are removed from contractions so "I'm in love with you" is transformed to "I am in love with you".

Japanese is written without spaces between the words. So spaces are first inserted. When the robot has been set up to process Japanese and English, a sentence like "let's see if you really do" is transformed to "let ' s see if you really do"


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