Third February Post

I started learning chatbot today!!

My mentor is working on a chatbot for our company, so there will be a chat place on their website where you can ask questions about anything about their work and definitions of coding vocabulary, and the chatbot will answer those questions automatically. How it works is that the chatbot is coded like a dictionary. I saw a list of vocabulary and phrases and answers for them; the answers could be definitions or ways to do certain things.

Our goal is to make the chatbot like a conversationalist and chat like a real human. However, one of the main problems is that the chatbot has to be flexible to any way the question is asked. If there is a word "hi" in the dictionary and the response to that is coded as "hello," the chatbot responds "hello" only if people say "hi." So if someone says "hey" to the chatbot, then he would say "no match found" because it is not coded exactly the same. My mentor, therefore, is working to teach the chatbot so that each word would connect to other possible words with the same meaning. What I did today was basically testing the chatbot. I had the list/dictionary next to me and typed questions in the chatbot to see if the chatbot responds to the way he is supposed to do. In order to test this, I asked in various ways. For example, instead of just asking, "How can I do XXX?" I asked, "what is the way to do XXX?" By doing this, I was able to determine what kind of questions confuses the chatbot and what works. I found out that "what does XXX mean?" confuses the chatbot, and he responds as "no match found."

Each trial is recorded in Excel, so we are able to review afterwards and improve the chatbot. Even though it will be a long way, we are hoping to publish the chatbot as soon as possible! I will be continuing learning chatbot.