looking for someone experienced in Chat AI

[Admin]

I'm looking to bring the chatbot AI to the next level.

Anyone with experience with AI related chat and interested in a real world application, let me know!

The general goal for it is to help beginners with debugging their robot and other basic questions. But at the moment it's highly reactive . . .

It's written in php . . .

[Webbot]

Did you look any further into free text engines like Lucene (written in Java but with a PhP wrapper available amongst others).

We use it within our commercial product and its used by lots of other folk (it seems to be a part of Eclipse nowadays as well). Its very quick - and is easy to use.

However it would be good to know your 'vision'. Obviously there is already a 'Search' function in SoR for finding stuff, the Chat (without any AI) is great for people to communicate on the fly. So what do you/users want out of the AI version of the Chat Room? Are you trying to amalgamate 'intra-user chat' with a 'search engine'? I'm not convinced IMHO that this is the right way to go. If I'm chatting to another member and say 'How did you get on with the $50 robot?' I dont want Chatbot to give me Google hits. On the other hand: there are lots of times when nobody else is 'in Chat' and you may want to ask Chatbot a question instead...(but thats just a Search)

I know it may not be possible with the current forum software but I still believe the best solution would be:
1. When you want to create a forum post that you enter a subject line, and/or the body text..
2. A search is done on the database to find relevant questions and if there are no relevant matches...
3. The user can create a new post or enter chat mode with whoever is online

This would reduce duplicate/repeat posts. Whereas at the moment: a user can just post a new thread without bothering to do a search. Having created the thread the site does a 'search' and lists 'similar threads' but by this time it is too late - the new thread is posted.

Whatever the route is: I think a user should expect 'one route' into asking a question and getting an answer. Currently they can choose from 'search', 'chat' or 'new thread' and I suggest that this too much choice (may be great features but not an intuitive process). Since they may see that there is no-one else in the chat room then they wont even bother going there.

Im not being -ve; honest!

[hoosier122]

http://alicebot.blogspot.com/

[Admin]

My dream is that the forum will be for hard questions (since only people are smart enough to answer), while the chatbot is for quick answers (since it's instant).

Some ideas I have for it . . . it'll remember previous questions you asked and try to narrow down what you are truly asking. It'll in theory remember when a question was asked before, and therefore not repeat the same answer again. It'll be able to compare/match your question to what was already asked in the forum. It'll also be able to figure out when two people are talking about the same question.

All the chatbots I'm aware of are entirely programmed to fool you it is a person - not actually do anything useful or be an 'expert reference resource.' Try asking any of the below chatbots how to build a robot, and you'll see how useless and ambiguous the replies are:
http://www.jeeney.com/
http://users.auth.gr/~dkaras/
http://alice.pandorabots.com/
http://66.150.245.139/chat/

And I'm not sure if php is the best way to go, it's just the easiest way I know.

And you are right, I think I should put more effort into forcing users to do a search before posting a thread. I remember you mentioning that before . . . I'll start looking into that now.

[Webbot]

Looked at the other sites - and they would just drive me nuts. After a question or two I would never go back!!

My humble view remains that if "I'm asking a question - then fundamentally I'm doing a search", but if I'm already chatting to someone then its probably for a reason and do I really want it to be interspersed with comments from Chatbot?

Adding extra functionality to the search is good. A common function is to search in the results. ie:-
1. Type in '$50 robot' and get 1000 hits
2. Type in 'regulator hot' and tick 'search within results' is the same as '$50 robot' AND 'regulator hot'
Of course you may choose to use 'AND' for all questions from the same Web session to imply the 'AND' but that makes it difficult to ask a second question within the same session.

So if you can make the Search more powerful then the 'Chat' just becomes a conference call with real people.

[hoosier122]

My dream is that the forum will be for hard questions (since only people are smart enough to answer), while the chatbot is for quick answers (since it's instant).

Some ideas I have for it . . . it'll remember previous questions you asked and try to narrow down what you are truly asking. It'll in theory remember when a question was asked before, and therefore not repeat the same answer again. It'll be able to compare/match your question to what was already asked in the forum. It'll also be able to figure out when two people are talking about the same question.

All the chatbots I'm aware of are entirely programmed to fool you it is a person - not actually do anything useful or be an 'expert reference resource.' Try asking any of the below chatbots how to build a robot, and you'll see how useless and ambiguous the replies are:
http://www.jeeney.com/
http://users.auth.gr/~dkaras/
http://alice.pandorabots.com/
http://66.150.245.139/chat/

And I'm not sure if php is the best way to go, it's just the easiest way I know.

And you are right, I think I should put more effort into forcing users to do a search before posting a thread. I remember you mentioning that before . . . I'll start looking into that now.

Most are just able to carry out every day conversations, not explain or solve technical problems.  Although they can solve simple math operations.  I've never tried asking one to solve an algebraic expression.

The question is how do you want to program it?  Do you want to program it with lots of info to start, or do you want it to "learn" like a child?  I don't know how public these algorithms are, but I imagine they are relatively basic.  It would be nearly impossible to program it with 100,000's of Q's & A's.  A mix of both may be the best option.

http://wiki.answers.com/ structure may be your best option...plus it's completely open source.

[Admin]

The question is how do you want to program it?  Do you want to program it with lots of info to start, or do you want it to "learn" like a child?  I don't know how public these algorithms are, but I imagine they are relatively basic.  It would be nearly impossible to program it with 100,000's of Q's & A's.  A mix of both may be the best option.

I have no problem with programming in the answers. The beginner will typically only ask one of say 300 questions. I got about ~100 already in there.

There are currently 7,659 threads in this forum. Quite a few are repeat questions. Can't be that hard to extract the most frequent 10%

It'll just take a programmer better than me, and with free time, to figure out how to match known questions to known answers intelligently. Now that I think about it, it's like using googles 'I'm feeling lucky' button, and actually getting a useful result on every try
The domain is very specialized, so can't be too hard?

[offy]

I know a good amount of PHP and Perl. I think perl will be the way to go with this since it is more advanced than PHP in some parts. PHP is mostly used to pull data.

[hoosier122]

The question is how do you want to program it?  Do you want to program it with lots of info to start, or do you want it to "learn" like a child?  I don't know how public these algorithms are, but I imagine they are relatively basic.  It would be nearly impossible to program it with 100,000's of Q's & A's.  A mix of both may be the best option.

I have no problem with programming in the answers. The beginner will typically only ask one of say 300 questions. I got about ~100 already in there.

There are currently 7,659 threads in this forum. Quite a few are repeat questions. Can't be that hard to extract the most frequent 10%

It'll just take a programmer better than me, and with free time, to figure out how to match known questions to known answers intelligently. Now that I think about it, it's like using googles 'I'm feeling lucky' button, and actually getting a useful result on every try
The domain is very specialized, so can't be too hard?

Do you just want it to be able to answer common questions?

[Admin]

I just saw this today on slashdot:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22702/

Its exactly what I want!

Technology Review is reporting on IBM's plans to take on Trebek at his own game. The 'Watson' computer system uses natural-language processing techniques to break down questions into their structural components and then search its database for relevant answers. A televised matchup with Trebek is planned for next year. 'David Ferrucci, the IBM computer scientist leading the effort, explains that the system breaks a question into pieces, searches its own databases for "related knowledge," and then finally makes connections to assemble a result. Watson is not designed to search the Web, and IBM's end goal is a system that it can sell to its corporate customers who need to make large quantities of information more accessible.'