living next door to alice

Christian Droßmann, Chairman of AIEthics at the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation

WWW: www.alicebot.org Email: [email protected]

Living next door to Alice...

An introduction to A.L.I.C.E. and AIML

http://www.alicebot.org/



Who am I?Name: Christian Droßmann

Age: 23

Current Occupation: Student of English and Philosophy at the University of Essen

Chairman of the Committee for Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation in San Francisco




The A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation

Dr. Richard S. Wallace, chairman and co-founder

Noel Bush, co-founder, formerly vice-president of engineering at Artificial Life Inc.

Nika Dubrovsky, co-founder




The A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation

Brenda Freedman, Franklin Institute Science MuseumPhiladelphia

Gene Riccoboni, Grimes & Battersby

Jon Baer, lead developer




Who is Alice?

• An open-source Chatterbot developed by Dr. Richard S. Wallace

• A.L.I.C.E. = „Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity“

• Uses CBR (Case Based Reasoning)




Who is Alice?

• Knowledgebase uses AIML, an XML-compliant „Artificial Intelligence Markup Language“ developed especially for the easy creation of chatterbots

• Written entirely in JAVA

• Output can contain anything you want (from a simple sentence in plaintext to complete HTML-pages)




Who is Alice?

• Modular design allows use of virtually any means of input and output

• The standard distribution includes interfaces for:

• IRC

• ICQ

• AOL Instant Messenger

• Macromedia FLASH




Who is Alice?

• Various third-party implementations include:

• WAP

• Your garden-variety telephone

• E-mail




Who is Alice?• Comes with a built-in HTTP-server (com-wrappers for external HTTP-servers coming soon!)

• Full user-authentication capabilities (including cookies)

• Can be connected to an SQL database for storage of user information




Who is Alice?• Easy customization via XML-templates and JAVA property files - no source code changes needed!

• Built-in JavaScript interpreter (can be disabled for security reasons)

• Capable of running external programs and executing system commands (can be disabled for security reasons)




Who is Alice?• Uses internal multithreading

• Maximum of simultaneous user connections only dependent on your hardware

• Can be programmed to speak any language and can handle multiple languages simultaneously (and thus could be used as an interpreter or an interactive dictionary)




Who is Alice?Alice won the Loebner Prize Contest in 2000 and 2001



What is it good for?• Entertainment

• Customer support (e.g. an interactive FAQ)

• Database frontend

• OS extension for hands-free operation (e.g. in wearables)

• Conversation trainer for use in second language acquisition



How does it work?

Responder

User

Graphmaster

Classifier




The Responder

• Interface between user and core routines

• Handles means of in- and output

• Transfers user input to the Classifier and delivers the bot‘s response to the user




The Classifier• Normalizes and filters the input

• Applies substitutions

• Splits the user input into sentences

• Transfers the normalized strings to the Graphmaster

• Processes the output from the Graphmaster and handles various AIML instructions

• Delivers the bot‘s response to the responder




The Graphmaster

• Organizes storage of brain content

• Content is stored as a graph (hence the name)

• Handles the pattern matching process

• Pattern matching involves an advanced search-tree algorithm

• Returns raw response template to the classifier




Inside The Graphmaster




Inside the Graphmaster




The Structure of AIML<category>

<pattern>NO</pattern>

<that>HAVE YOU DATED ANY ROBOTS BEFORE</that>

<template>

I think you might be happier with a human.

</template>

</category>




The Structure of AIML

<category>

<pattern>WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF *</pattern>

<template>

<srai>WHAT DOES <star/> MEAN</srai>

</template>

</category>





<pattern>WHAT IS THE CAPITAL OF *</pattern>

<template>

<think><set name="search">capital</set></think>

<srai>DEFINE <star/></srai>

</template>

</category>

<category>

<pattern>DEFINE *</pattern>

<template>

<condition>

<li name="search" value="what">I do not know what <star/> is.</li>

<li name="search" value="capital">I do not know that capital.</li>

<li name="search" value="where"><srai>WHEREISIS <star/></srai></li>

</condition>

<srai>FIND <star/></srai>

</template>

</category>




<pattern>WHEN WAS * INVENTED</pattern>

<template>

<random>

<li>A few years before it came into general use.</li>

<li>Earlier that most people think.</li>

<li>It took quite a while to catch on.</li>

<li><set name="it"><star/></set> was developed over a long

period of time.</li>

</random>

</template>

</category>



Why does it work?• The meaning of and the sense in a conversation lies in the eye of the beholder

• People tend to interpret to an extent way beyond the nature of the thing

• Is the human mind really more than just a highly efficient and complex pattern-matching machine?



Possible Dangers• Emotionally weak persons may develop emotional relationships (friendship or worse)

• In the future, it will become more and more difficult to tell a bot from a human being

•



More information and Alice-in-action

Foundation home page: http://www.alicebot.org

Sample Alicebot using FLASH interface: http://www.alicebot.net

WearBot: http://www.wearlab.de

CVS Repository (for developers, anonymous access permitted): http://cvs.alicebot.org

living next door to alice

Documents

ai foundationwww

chairman of aiethics

ai foundationdr

reasoningchristian dromann

aimlchristian dromann

ai foundationbrenda

cofounderchristian dromann

university of essen