Vincent Massol Think Tank

FAQ bots

[ vmassol ] 19:36, Thursday, 1 April 2004

A year ago, I spent some time looking at Alice Bot. It's a bot that allows discussing with human beings. It has won several times the Loebner prize, which means it gets as close as possible to imitating a human person. The bot is controlled by XML files written in AIML.

The idea that I had at that time was to use it as a live FAQ answerer for the Cactus project. I never came to do it though... need more time...

I've been reminded of this idea by some posts on the Cactus mailing list. I'd venture that at least 50-70% of the the questions asked have already been answered in some form in the past, are available in the Cactus documentation or are easy to answer by some generic rule. I think it could be fun to train a bot to answer these questions. For those that the bot couldn't answer, the user would be redirected to the mailing list where Cactus experts would find the answer and train the bot so that it gets better next time.

It should be possible to have rules that would generate the following kind of dialogue:

[user] I'm getting an error when running Cactus tests
[bot] Is the error happening on the client side or the server side?
[user] I don't know
[bot] Could you turn logging on and see if the error appears in the client side log or the server side log?
[user] how do I turn logging on?
[bot] See the Cactus logging configuration page
[user] It's happening on the client side
[bot] Is the error hapenning during the HTTP connection?
[user] yes
etc...

It would be cool! My only worry is that it would take too long to create the AIML files. But maybe not. Any experience?

What would be even better would be that the bot would learn from the mailing list posts itself. However, that's probably science fiction at this point in time...

Note: The image was borrowed from Alicebot.org