Skip to main content

Wallace: Incorporating Search into Chatting

  • Conference paper
PRICAI 2014: Trends in Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8862))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 6349 Accesses

Abstract

Chatbots are a well-established technology, however the conversational ability of the typical chatbot is greatly restricted. This paper investigates how the performance of a chatbot could be improved by connecting it with a knowledge source that could be used during its interactions with users. A new chatbot, Wallace, was created by extending Alice to incorporate knowledge from Wikipedia into its conversations. Mechanisms were designed and developed to retrieve Wikipedia pages, parse them, and select suitable sentences for the conversation. A user evaluation was conducted on the prototype, which showed that Wallace was generally more effective than Alice at providing factual answers to questions denoting an informational need. Participants also expressed that Wallace was more specific and more entertaining than Alice.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Abbattista, F., Degemmis, M., Licchelli, O., Lops, P., Semeraro, G., Zambetta, F.: Improving the usability of an e-commerce web site through personalization. Recommendation and Personalization in eCommerce 2, 20–29 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Aizawa, A.: An information-theoretic perspective of tf–idf measures. Information Processing & Management 39(1), 45–65 (2003)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Feng, D., Shaw, E., Kim, J., Hovy, E.: An intelligent discussion-bot for answering student queries in threaded discussions. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 171–177. ACM (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Higuchi, S., Rzepka, R., Araki, K.: A casual conversation system using modality and word associations retrieved from the web. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 382–390. Association for Computational Linguistics (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Inoue, M., Matsuda, T., Yokoyama, S.: Web resource selection for dialogue system generating natural responses. In: Stephanidis, C. (ed.) Posters, Part I, HCII 2011. CCIS, vol. 173, pp. 571–575. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Mikic, F.A., Burguillo, J.C., Llamas, M., Rodríguez, D.A., Rodríguez, E.: Charlie: An aiml-based chatterbot which works as an interface among ines and humans. In: EAEEIE Annual Conference, pp. 1–6. IEEE (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ravichandran, D., Pantel, P., Hovy, E.: Randomized algorithms and nlp: using locality sensitive hash function for high speed noun clustering. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 622–629. Association for Computational Linguistics (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Strauss, A., Corbin, J.: Grounded theory methodology. In: Handbook of Qualitative Research, pp. 273–285 (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Tata, S., Patel, J.M.: Estimating the selectivity of tf-idf based cosine similarity predicates. ACM SIGMOD Record 36(2), 7–12 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

da Silva, A.S., Gao, X., Andreae, P. (2014). Wallace: Incorporating Search into Chatting. In: Pham, DN., Park, SB. (eds) PRICAI 2014: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8862. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13560-1_68

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13560-1_68

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13559-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13560-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics