RMRSBot – Using Linguistic Information to Enrich a Chatbot

Coming to open domain dialog it is still unrealistic to implement needed knowledge resources and dialog skills linguistically. Since the Non Player Characters (NPC) in our NPC Engine should be capable of open conversation we decided to use an Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) [1] chatbot as a first workaround. However AIML chatbots are not linguistically motivated, they use surface structures in tradition of Weizenbaums ELIZA [2], wherefore they do have too many shortcomings to use them in real dialog applications. One of the major problems is the handling of surface variation. To be able to process one sentence with different structures, they need as much patterns as there are syntactic alternatives, which leads to an exploding number of pattern template pairs. To reduce the costs of the manual development, AIML authors use simple regular expression operators, what in turn leads to the problem of being overly permissive. A possibility to abstract from the surface level and still be able to control the structure is to use information from syntactic and semantic analysis. In the presented system two scenarios were implemented: 1. Using part of speech information and 2. Using the results from a semantic analysis.