I’d like to be able to put data in external files and do a simple data lookup based upon an input.  I’ve been scouring a number of online resources and haven’t yet found a clear way to do this with AIML 1.0.1 running the Python version of the AIML interpretter.  Sure, I can hardcode a set of responses in aiml files but if want to be able to retrieve say a thousand or more different values, I’d rather have an external file that stores the data in the form of category-key-value where I’m using the category and the key to determine the right value to retrieve.

Is there an easy way to do this so that the data would look like this:
cat1 entity1 value1
cat1 entity2 value1
cat2 entity1 value1

You can’t do that in AIML 1 without hardcoding the files as categories. However, in AIML 2, search for maps and sets.

Thanks so much for confirming that. Is there a reliable Python implementation in AIML 2 or would you recommend looking at other language variants?

I’m unaware of a Python implementation of AIML 2.0 (others may know differently). If you are not forced to go the Python route, I would check out Program AB which supports AIML 2.0

https://code.google.com/archive/p/program-ab/

Marcus (Endicot) sent me a link to a question about AIML 2.0 interpreters over on Quora, where the person asking (it’s unclear whether the one asking was Marcus or not, from what I could see) mentioned Python. Sadly, I don’t have any more of an answer that Steve here does, and I was about to suggest the same thing, but I thought I would mention that this isn’t the only place where this question (or one very much like it) is being asked.

Hehe, someone asked me the question, and I was just deferring to the real experts…. 

If you were trying to pick a chatbot framework for development on Ubuntu that is receiving continual updates which has strong machine learning and natural language capabilities, which platforms would you recommend the most?  I’ve looked at AIML, Pandorabots, Microsoft Bot Framework, and Chatscript and am wondering which stands out as a future leader.  I’m very impressed by Chatscript in terms of its long-term performance but am not sure if any of the other platforms also exhibit the same level of capabilities and continual updates.