The Conversational Agent (CA) is a computer program that can engage in conversation using natural language dialogue with a human participant. Most CAs employ a pattern-matching technique to map user input onto structural patterns of sentences. However, every combination of utterances that a user may send as input must be taken into account when constructing such a script. This chapter was concerned with constructing a novel CA using sentence similarity measures. Examining word meaning rather than structural patterns of sentences meant that scripting was reduced to a couple of natural language sentences per rule as opposed to potentially 100s of patterns. Furthermore, initial results indicate good sentence similarity matching with 13 out of 18 domain-specific user utterances as opposed to that of the traditional pattern matching approach.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
A. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Mind, Vol. 54 (236), 1950, pp. 433–460.
D. W. Massaro, M. M. Cohen, J. Beskow, S. Daniel, and R. A. Cole, “Developing and Evaluating Conversational Agents”, Santa Cruz, CA: University of California, 1998.
J. Weizenbaum, ELIZA — “A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine”, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol. 9, 1966, pp. 36—45.
K. Colby, “Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Process”. New York: Pergamon, 1975.
R. S. Wallace, ALICE: Artificial Intelligence Foundation Inc. [Online]. Available: http://www.alicebot.org_(2008, February 01).
D. Michie and C. Sammut, Infochat Scripter's Manual. Manchester: Convagent, 2001.
G. A. Sanders and J. Scholtz, “Measurement and Evaluation of Embodied Conversational Agents”, in Embodied Conversational Agents, Chapter 12, J. Cassell, J. Sullivan, S. Prevost and E. Churchill, eds., Embodied Conversational Agents, MIT Press, 2000.
T. K. Landauer, P. W. Foltz, and D. Laham, “Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis”. Discourse Processes, Vol. 25 (2–3), 1998, pp. 259–284.
Y. Li, D. McLean, Z. A. Bandar, J. D. O'Shea, and K. Crockett, “Sentence Similarity Based on Semantic Nets and Corpus Statistics”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 18 (8), 2006, pp. 1138–1149.
D. Landauer, D. Laham, and P. W. Foltz, “Learning Human-Like Knowledge by Singular Value Decomposition: A Progress Report”, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10, M. I. Jordan, M. J. Kearns, and S. A. Solla, eds., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 45–51.
G. A. Miller, “WordNet: A Lexical Database for English”, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol. 38 (11), 1995, pp. 39–41.
Y. Li, Z. A. Bandar, and D. Mclean, “An Approach for Measuring Semantic Similarity between Words using Multiple Information Sources”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 15 (4), 2003, pp. 871–881.
C. Sammut, “Managing Context in a Conversational Agent”, Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3 (7), 2001, pp. 1–7.
D. Michie, “Return of the Imitation Game”, Electronic Transactions in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 6 (2), 2001, pp. 203–221.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O'Shea, K., Bandar, Z., Crockett, K. (2009). Towards a New Generation of Conversational Agents Based on Sentence Similarity. In: Ao, SI., Gelman, L. (eds) Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computational Science. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2311-7_43
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2311-7_43
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-2310-0
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-2311-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)