Multple sentence answer problem

There are a couple of things I'm going to try.

1. Edit the AIML to remove full stops in the

Two bots chatting - test

Below is a link to a test interface (Version 9 - 14 January 2011). It is still a 'work in progress' with several issues to be resolved. However, as a 'proof of concept' it's alright to play with.

To start them chatting type in some text in the text field at the top of the interface and click the 'Start Talking' button.

They will keep going until you click the 'Stop Me' button. As they go they get more and more confused - this is one of the issues to be resolved. In particular, the issue of sentence splitting needs to be resolved. If one bot answers with a reply that contains multiple sentence (e.g. I love Star Trek. My favorite series is 'Voyager'.) the other bot will try to supply an answer for both sentences. This very quickly gets out of hand - more and more sentences being passed between the two. Just hit the 'Stop Me' button.

The bots are hosted on the Pandorabots site ( Pandorabots )

You can clear all the fields and all the text by clicking the 'Clear' button.

Most of the dialog is based on the standard Alice set. However, a few AIML elements have been changed - those relating to 'mother', 'science fiction' and 'Star Trek'.

Have a play and let me know what you think.

This is a link will open a new browser window displaying the Flash .swf interface

Bergson - agency and structure

In his essay of 1911 Bergson proposes a ‘new law’ of humour, “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing” (2005, p.28). In this project his ‘law’ will be tested by inversion; will we laugh every time a thing gives us the impression of being a person? Further, will the incongruity of our impression oscillating between the human and the non-human call forth a shared anxiety that we have about media technology?

Bergson's concept of the mechanical encrusted ('plastered' may be a better translation of the original French) on the human is analogous to the relationship between agency and structure. The individual's agency is, for want of a better term, their free will - their ability to act in the world by making choices that have real consequences. The mechanical is then all of the structures of the world. These structures are typically described by rules and laws: the laws of physics, the rules of language, the rules of etiquette, and even the rule of law. Cartoon 'violence' toys with laws of physics - the coyote lives and dies as a result of these laws. The pun, the malaprop and the double entendre are manipulations of the laws of language. Borat shatters the rules of etiquette. The Keystone Cops, Top Cat's Officer Dibble, Rumpole of the Bailey, and so many others expose the farcical nature of the rule of law.

Giddens concept of 'structuration' brings agency and structure together - each dependent of the other. A kind of co-dependent marriage. There is a deep level of incongruity between agency and structure. Not all incongruity leads to comedy but is it a necessary if not satisfactory condition.

Bergson was talking about these subterranean incongruities.

Henri Bergson, Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic.

A little success story

Two bots are now up and running on Pandorabots. I created a new one today called Detayle Bhoy. The initial bot is currently called MMM, however, he responds as Mr Dick Trickster.

The reason for starting up the second bot... I've got the Flash interface working. The output from one becomes the input for the other and so on... I had to build a StopMe button just to get the to shut up! They are completely nonsensical at the moment. As the 'conversations' go on they tend to generate multi-sentence / multi-line replies. These in turn generate even more milti-sentence text that is nearly always bizarrely self referential. This is something I'll serious need to address in the AIML sets. I may even try to kill of 'second sentence' categories.

As these bots share a common base of AIML there is also a lot of recursion going on. This too is something I'll have to edit out.

Jobs for another day.

More bot technology...

The actionscript by Jamie Durrant is really useful. I initially managed to get it to talk to one bot. Today, I rewrote the code and copied the interface so that I can have access to two bots in the one interface (I've called the file - botAS3v4.as). Cool, and fairly painless. The next trick is use the variables to create the interaction. Now that I have a variable for the output of one I should be able to feed it to the input of the other. This will probably require an 'on completion' function so that incomplete lines of dialogue don't get fed through the system. Anyway, that's a job for another day.

Bot technology ... continued

Today I uploaded a Flash .swf file to a local server (one I normally use for teaching). The file, based on Jamie Durrant's work, is a chatbot interface that talks to a test bot I have running on the Pandorabots site. It appears to be working quite well with none of the security issues I got when trying to run it from a local machine. Speed is the only problem. Occasionally, the response from the Pandorabot site is a little slow... Maybe I could script a 'filler' output to fill out the wait time if it gets too long.

The URL for the test bot is - Talk to Dick at Pandorabots

Have a play and feel free to add a comment.

Summer School report

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be going through my notes from the Summer School and adding some posts about the lecture series content.

Suffice to say, at the moment, this was without a doubt the valuable research related experience of my academic career.