A centre of expertise in digital information management UKOLN is supported by: Brian the Brain: IWMW's very own Chatbot

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk www.bath.ac.uk

UKOLN is supported by:

Brian the Brain: IWMW's very own Chatbot

Marieke Guy

Interoperability Focus

[email protected]



Why a Chatbot?

• Something new and innovative for IWMW

• Not currently used in the education sector or e-learning

• Interested in finding out more about:– How Chatbots work– Accessibility issues– How people actually use chatbots– What their potential is for our community– If Chatbots can learn from users (AI)



Initial Chatbot Specification

• Discussed the IWMW specification with Dadenlimited

• Supplied Dadenlimited with some data to initially populate the chatbot with:

– A list of possible questions for Brian to answer(Who, Why, What, When, Where, Which, How, Is?)

– A list of Bath related rss feeds and Web sites

• Dadenlimited set up an avatar account (Sitepal with oddcast)



Building Brian• Ther oddcast account allows users to design

characters using the clothing and colouring tools available

• Can change their eyes, hair, mouth, skin, make up, width and breadth of features and clothes (hats, glasses, jewellery etc.)

• Once a character is created you can edit scenes using the character library, audio library and background library

• Can even control movement of eyes• System is fairly intuitive









Brian’s Brain• Once Brian (the character) was created he was

connected to the chatbot engine • Given access to the Brian bot manager, supplied with

documentation and allowed to edit and build cases• Cases were supplied for small talk, personality or core• They use either patterns, AIML or keywords• AIML uses triples (similar to RDF) – subject, predicate

and object e.g Marieke is giving this presentation• From the manager you can edit your character, edit

config files and view the log files (IP address, time/date of conversation)



Next Steps

• Intensive user testing – UKOLN staff

• Edited use cases

• Use of the random tag

• Released into the community

• More editing of use cases, monitoring of log files

• Spelling issues, phrasing issues

• Further evaluation



Fun with Log files #1• User: Can I have a bath in bath?

Brian: I'll have a think about that and get back to you.

• User: What about Web 2.0 then eh?Brian: Web 2.0 is very big this year at the institutional web management workshop! we have several plenaries on this topic as well as a panel session and parallel sessionUser: Do not you think its all a load of hype?

• User: Do you like Marieke? Brian: Not bothered.



Fun with Log files #2• User: How old are you

Brian: Twenty fiveUser: Liar Brian: Liar ? User: You look older than 25 Brian: Thank you.

• User: Are you real?Brian: Depends what you mean by real.

• User: You are American.Brian: Thank you.User: It wasn’t necessarily a compliment.



Fun with Log files #3• User: Who are you?

Brian: Marieke is my owner and bot master. User: Is Marieke nice to you?Brian: MaybeUser: Are you nice to her?Brian: Yes, I think so.

• User: Do you like having a beard Brian: Having a beard?

• User: Who will win the 2:30 at Chepstow?Brian: Sorry I don't know.



Chatting with Brian

• http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2006/chatbot/ - IWMW page on Chatbots

• Flash needed - http://www.daden.co.uk/chatbots/livebots/brian/ - Brian the Brain

• http://www.daden.co.uk/cgi-bin/chatbot/chatbot.pl?api=init&op=chtml&bot=brian – Text only version



Final Thoughts

• Potential with learners - Emile project

• Improving presentations - interaction, different perspective

• Something gimicky on your Web site - new, first HE adopters

• Cost

• Does it engage users?

• Jabberwacky - learning from users is the way forward

• NLP issues, similar to machine translation etc. Can work within very tight boundaries - Ikea Chatbot

• No doubt that research in this area will carry on



Any Questions?

Documents

A centre of expertise in digital information management UKOLN is supported by: Brian the Brain: IWMW's very own Chatbot