Category Archives: Research

Improving Chatbot Accuracy -Draft

This entry is part 5 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

Researchers have employed a variety of methods to improve their chatbot’s accuracy. Most current chatbots use a dialog management module and knowledge base and rules, which they use with templates to match user input. Improving chatbot accuracy may be accomplished through expanding the chatbot knowledge base, improving upon the standard rule-based conversation method for chatbots, [...]

Improving Human-Like Qualities of Chatbots -Draft

This entry is part 4 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

Some researchers are designing chatbots with the intent of integrating more natural human-like interactions (De Angeli & Brahnam, 2008). Specifically, the developer may program certain responses that would sacrifice accuracy, but confer more human-like traits (Sing et al., 2006). For example, if a chatbot is presented with a math problem it could wait, as if [...]

Building Better Chatbots -Draft

This entry is part 3 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

The major goal of building a better chatbot is to improve its interactions with humans. A wide variety of techniques including developing different architectures, incorporating quirks or tricks, or using different machine learning approaches have been used to improve either chatbot accuracy or human-like qualities. First, some ways that researchers are trying to improve human-like [...]

How do Humans View Chatbots? -Draft

This entry is part 2 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

Since chatbots have moved into the public realm, there has been interest in evaluating how users interact with chatbots. For example, after analyzing conversations with the chatbot jabberwacky, one study found that the topics and style of conversations were broad (De Angeli & Brahnam, 2008). Users displayed different attitudes ranging from nice to nasty and [...]

Rule-Based Conversation -Draft

This entry is part 1 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

The majority of current chatbots use a rule-based approach to interact with the user. In order to imitate human conversations, developers use a linguistic model combined with computational algorithms to build chatbots. Depending on the chatbot, rules can be based on simple textual pattern matching or complicated rules based on inference mechanisms (De Angeli & [...]

Natural Language Processing -Draft

This entry is part 8 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

Chatbots need to effectively process natural language. Since starting around the 1960′s, natural language processing (NLP) research has had slow progress until the 1990′s (Lester, Branting, & Mott, 2004). NLP research has been greatly enhanced by development of large corpora of tagged text, as well as by development of better statistical machine learning and other [...]

How Chatbots Work -Draft

This entry is part 7 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

The goal of a chatbot is to simulate the human use of language which brings up several questions. How do humans use language between themselves in similar settings? How can computers be made to understand natural language? How does the chatbot know what to reply to a user’s input? (Saygin et al., 2000). In overall [...]

Practical Applications of Chatbots -Draft

This entry is part 6 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

Chatbots are currently being used in a variety of public arenas. Chatbots are being used as tutors and in the classroom. For example, CLIVE is used to practice language, help users0 conversational skills, and is based on myCybertwin technology; a commercial AI platform (Zakos & Capper, 2008). CLIVE was found to perform well in holding [...]

Request for Comments

This entry is part 1 of 13 in the series The State of Chatbots

I am requesting for comments on my research, please email me rwhetsel AT ravensong DOT com, for user rights if you are interested in helping me. FYI: I will be posting my references and bibTex files for my literature review when I finish my thesis. Chatbot Literature Review: The State of Chatbots “Do Chatbots Dream [...]