CS 599 Dialogue Modelling  Fall 2005

Assignment 2: Building/Extending simple chat systems

Due: Monday September 19th

Topic: Travel and natural disasters

Your assignment is to build a chat-bot that can have casual conversations about travel to other places and natural disasters that can happen there. You should modify Eliza, ALICE, or some other chatbot so that it can recognize comments and questions about movies and provide similar comments and questions. Some ideas:

Where are you from?

I come from Paris, France.

Where would you like to go on vacation?

Bali

Don't they have tsumani's there?

Well, in Los Angeles, they have earthquakes, so what are you going to do?

Your modification should involve at least three different rules that can support a number of different inputs, and produce appropriate replies in some cases.

Turn in:

1) a listing of your changes to the code

2) a transcript of a positive interaction with the system (system is answering questions appropriately)

3) a transcript of a negative interaction (system shows it is not really understanding the questions properly)

4) (optional) a  runnable demo

Some chatbot links :

• Lee Spector's simple eliza lisp code

http://hampshire.edu/lspector/courses/eliza-simple.lisp

• Simon Laven's chatterbot page

http://www.simonlaven.com/

AIML bots page:

http://www.alicebot.org/downloads/

web hosted bot:

http://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/home