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Adapting a Conversational Text Generator for Online Chatbot Messaging

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Internet Science (INSCI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11551))

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Abstract

Conversational interfaces and chatbots have a long history, but have only recently been hyped as a disruptive technology ready to replace mobile apps and Web sites. Many online messaging platforms have introduced support to third-party chatbots, which can be procedurally programmed, but usually rely on a retrieval-based specification language (such as AIML), natural language processing to detect the user’s intent, or on machine learning. In this work we present a work-in-progress integration of a widely-used system for story generation, the Tracery grammar, a conversational agent design tool, the Bottery system, and online messaging platforms. The proposed system provides a complete and easy-to-use system that allows the creation of chatbots with a graph-based dialogue structure, a contextual memory, pattern-based text matching, and advanced text generation capabilities, that aims for being well-suited for experts and technically unskilled authors alike. Features of the system and future additions are discussed and compared to existing solutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Microsoft Bot Connector, https://dev.botframework.com.

  2. 2.

    Dialogflow, backed by Google, https://dialogflow.com.

  3. 3.

    Wit.ai, https://wit.ai.

  4. 4.

    Pandorabots, https://pandorabots.com.

  5. 5.

    IBM Watson Assistant, https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/conversation/.

  6. 6.

    Official repository: https://github.com/ComputerScienceUniUrb/messaging-bottery.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DiSPeA, University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy

    Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein, Saverio Delpriori & Alessio Ricci

Authors
  1. Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein
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  2. Saverio Delpriori
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  3. Alessio Ricci
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Svetlana S. Bodrunova

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway

    Asbjørn Følstad

  4. Inria, Le Chesnay, France

    Harry Halpin

  5. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Polina Kolozaridi

  6. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Leonid Yuldashev

  7. St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Anna Smoliarova

  8. TU München, Munich, Germany

    Heiko Niedermayer

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Klopfenstein, L.C., Delpriori, S., Ricci, A. (2019). Adapting a Conversational Text Generator for Online Chatbot Messaging. In: Bodrunova, S., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11551. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_8

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17705-8

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