A Survey of Design Techniques for Conversational Agents

A conversational agent also referred to as chatbot is a computer program which tries to generate human like responses during a conversation. Earlier chatbots employed much simpler retrieval based pattern matching design techniques. However, with time a number of new chatbots evolved with an aim to make it more human like and hence to pass the Turing test. Now, most of the chatbots employ generative knowledge based techniques. This paper will discuss about various chatbot design techniques, classification of chatbot and discussion on how the modern chatbots have evolved from simple pattern matching, retrieval based model to modern complex knowledge based models. A table of major conversational agents in chronological order along with their design techniques is also provided at the end of the paper.

[1]  Luke K. Fryer,et al.  Bots as Language Learning Tools , 2006 .

[2]  Danilo P. Mandic,et al.  Recurrent Neural Networks for Prediction , 2001 .

[3]  Hadeel Al-Zubaide,et al.  OntBot: Ontology based chatbot , 2011, International Symposium on Innovations in Information and Communications Technology.

[4]  N. F. Noy,et al.  Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology , 2001 .

[5]  Michael L. Mauldin,et al.  CHATTERBOTS, TINYMUDS, and the Turing Test: Entering the Loebner Prize Competition , 1994, AAAI.

[6]  Jürgen Schmidhuber,et al.  Long Short-Term Memory , 1997, Neural Computation.

[7]  Michele L. McNeal,et al.  Chatbot Creation Options , 2013 .

[8]  Klaus Meffert.  Supporting design patterns with annotations , 2006, 13th Annual IEEE International Symposium and Workshop on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems (ECBS'06).

[9]  Quoc V. Le,et al.  Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks , 2014, NIPS.

[10]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  Learning long-term dependencies with gradient descent is difficult , 1994, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks.

[11]  Tomek Strzalkowski,et al.  VCA: An Experiment with a Multiparty Virtual Chat Agent , 2010 .

[12]  Kenneth Mark Colby,et al.  Ten criticisms of parry , 1974, SGAR.

[13]  Martin Llamas,et al.  CHARLIE: An AIML-based chatterbot which works as an interface among INES and humans , 2009, 2009 EAEEIE Annual Conference.

[14]  Paco Xander Nathan,et al.  FRED, Milton and Barry: the evolution of intelligent agents for the Web , 1997 .

[15]  Joseph Weizenbaum,et al.  and Machine , 1977 .

[16]  Gobinda G. Chowdhury,et al.  Natural language processing , 2005, Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[17]  Edson P. Pimentel,et al.  Artificial Intelligence MArkup Language: A Brief Tutorial , 2013, ArXiv.

[18]  A. M. Turing,et al.  Computing Machinery and Intelligence , 1950, The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.

[19]  Richard S. Wallace,et al.  The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E. , 2009 .

[20]  Danilo P. Mandic,et al.  Recurrent Neural Networks for Prediction: Learning Algorithms, Architectures and Stability , 2001 .

[21]  Y. Wilks,et al.  CONVERSE: a Conversational Companion , 1999 .