There are a number of threads that have come up recently about the capabilities of a chat bot AI language. Is it time that the industry agrees on a new one for knowledge transfer?

AIML has probably been the most popular but has not changed in a decade. We (and our computers) have changed a lot in the last 10 years and will continue to evolve in the next 10.

I created my own language (JAIL-Javascript Aritficial Intelligence Language).
Many botmasters who developed their own interpreters also develop their language for knowledge management.

Some others:
Chatscript
RiveScript
MakeAIML(outputs AIML)
Verbots has its own
Pandora bots has its own

If we created a new language, what features would we need? What functions do we expect the interpreter to be able to preform?
Interpreter neutral?
Regular Expressions?
Store and retrieve values?
Aliases?
Plug-ins?

I meant to say Personality Forge has its own, Pandorabots uses a AIML dialect.

Well posted, Merlin! I didn’t see “my” answer, though, which would be “Yes - but undecided as to how to proceed”, but given what I’ve posted in response to those posts you’ve mentioned would require a bit of explaining.

I’ve posted my thoughts on some proposed expansion/extension of the AIML standard, indicating that a new standard might be needed which would extend AIML and it’s capabilities, and I do believe that this would be a good idea. But I also feel that, while AIML is a great “first step” for beginners, and for people who are creating their first chat agent, it’s only that: a “first step”. Creating an extended standard, on top of AIML would make an excellent “second step”, for those botmasters who want to take their chatbot “to the next level”, and increase both capabilities and efficiency would benefit greatly from a new, extended standard. However, while I support this, I also feel that other avenues of research should be pursued, as well; I’m just undecided right now as to what those avenues should be.

I wonder if there’s enough “new material” that warrants a new standard already. It could be, I just don’t know.
I like the idea of people building their own languages to test out new ideas. Only when a clear winner emerges from those experiments, it’s time to think about a new standard.

For this reason, I’d rather see the emergence of some bot software platform/library that provides basic building blocks for building domain specific bot languages, and for embedding them in a web page (because that makes it much easier to get many users to interact with your creation). Such platform in my opinion should be implemented in a general purpose programming language, and allow users to define their own extensions. Building an AIML interpreter should be straightforward using building blocks provided by the platform. Maybe it could be as simple as a library of prolog predicates?

As for research directions in AIML-like bots…. I don’t think there’s a shortage in the ideas department yet.
- how to effectively combine supervised and unsupervised learning; can you give your bot a set of “basic norms and values” that influence how it educates itself?
- topic management (how to efficiently take topic into account in conversations; how to infer topic from conversations without requiring explicitly setting it)
- emo-models: how to add “mood” to a bot, and how to update its mood as the conversation progresses? can you somehow get a bot the go through the five phases of loss/grief without explicitly programming those five fases as a state machine?
- AIML: semantic analysis and refactoring of AIML documents (e.g. tools that help find finding and abstracting similar rules)
- new applications of AIML: e.g. can you tap into the power of AIML to add a natural language front end to console applications? (in combination with google’s speech recognition and synthesis capabilities, this might yield very interesting results, where you talk in natural language to your application)

Disclaimer: I’m not actively researching any bot related stuff myself, and I don’t have a clear view on what exists already.

I think it could make an extension of the AIML language and though born as a simple language that could be developed for more experienced developers could make more sophisticated bots.

As there are many manuals: paragraphs to go slowly learning here could also be the case, and could make several levels:
- Basic
- Medium
- Advanced
- Expert

Creating an extension of language must ensure backward compatibility and any previous development should continue to work. He who does not want to use these new features can still use the language simple, and anyone who wants further has the tools to do so.

For my part as he named Dave will continue to advance the AAIML (Avanced AIML), which works right in my interpretation gives a bit the same, because others do likewise with its own language.

I’ll incorporate elements of AI, such as those described above, ontology (already built), dictionary lexicon (incorporated English and Spanish), expert systems (and built with a miniature version of prolog), fuzzy logic, self-learning, auto search of knowledge in spare time, etc. .. .

My vote is for biocentric, instead of machine-centric.  It is most important, in my view, for Artificial Intelligence to evolve from human creativity with the raw power of the computer at their fingertips.

Leo Ktaba,

One of the strengths of AIML is that its simplicity appeals to a large community of people.
To have that much extraordinary teamwork support, with that many human brains contributing and focusing
on a single goal is a huge accomplishment.

No doubt the simplicity that he wanted to give the AIML language, and see what kind of person is recommended. For my purposes it is quite short and although there are attempts to make bots in other languages, when the bot does not try to do in English and in Spanish it even more noticeable shortcomings.

The expansion does not mean they have to use. AIML allows the creation of new tags to perform actions according to the needs of the programmer (at least the version I use myself), and these would be completely incompatible in another interpreter. The [removed] tag is an open door to “do what you want if not in AIML. I suggested that that open door were useful tools for not starting from scratch.

For my part and I desist to incorporate new features to the language AIML and go on another line alternative, I guess somebody might like it and he gets to use someday. As well have said some many bots are tailor made to the needs of each developer.

My answer is not in the list: we don’t need a new AI-language (or any AI-language), because strong-AI will create it’s own language.

I’ve experimented with AIML for some years now.  I’ve included contexts (the <context> tag extending topics considerably).  I’ve added emotions and orchestrating the avatar’s expressions. I’ve done speech input and text-to-speech output. I have communicated with a simple web server, a Loebner protocol, an IRC chat client so that the program could act as an agent to external environments. I have tapped into Cyc for the common sense ontology.  I’ve organized the predicates (<set> tags) into a hierarchy or a network with inheritance and even daemons on the actions such as add/delete a value.  I have extended the template processing to include “barge-in” responses and time outs, etc.  I have put conditions on the templates to have them fail (the <guard> tag) and resume the AIML pattern matching from where they were in the tree. I have included an extended language (the [removed] tag) to run an expert system or to run a general purpose planner or to interface with databases including the TAP database (with a slight modification it could also do the Wikipedia DB) and ConceptNet or to pull from RSS feeds or the internet. It also parses sentences, tags sentences, extracts various parts of speech, uses WordNet for finding base words and then all the “...nyms” for the senses.  It also does natural language generation, just the surface realization functions.  With exits before the sentence is processed by the AIML interpreter, after the sentence, and after all the sentences have made the response, to run more extended script, the flexibility to enhance AIML is there.  All this can be used to automatically generate more AIML categories as well. Or to scan and analyze AIML.

It still needs genetics and/or neural nets to fulfill most of the classic approaches to AI.

What more do you want it to do?  The extended AIML is backwards compatible to the published standard 1.0.1.  The additional scripting language would hardly be fit for any “standard”, but it is plain text.

AIML has some fundamental issues.  It is difficult to match the question “Is * *” like in “Is the cardinal a bird?” verses “Is the cardinal red?” verses “Is the cardinal tired?” verses “Is the Saint Louis Cardinal famous?” verses “Is the Arizona Cardinal Abdullah?”, etc.  There are other types of sentences that would have to be explicit because you can’t pull objects by using the wildcards which means sensible processing of the “tail” end of the input distribution, those rare things the client says, can only be done by code in the templates. Traditional AIML sets do this cleanup in a “pick-up” category.

Hans,

Strong Artificial Intelligence comes from Strong Natural Intelligence.

Gary Dubuque - Apr 19, 2011:

What more do you want it to do?

It sounds quite cool already. Is it available for experimentation somewhere ?

http://www.aimlpad.com or http://sourceforge.net/projects/program-n/

It is open source, but feel free to modify, enhance, etc.

That’s awesome Gary!

I definitely want to check it out.

8PLA • NET - Apr 19, 2011:

Hans,

Strong Artificial Intelligence comes from Strong Natural Intelligence.

(I’m back )

Strong Artificial Intelligence is stronger, infinite stronger, than Natural Intelligence.

Welcome back, Erwin.

I’m not in agreement there. At least, not if my understanding of 8pla’s assertion is correct. I believe that 8pla is referring to human intelligence when he referred to Natural Intelligence. If this is not the case, perhaps some clarification of meaning is in order. However, if I’m correct, then Strong Artificial Intelligence only has the potential of becoming greater, and that potential is a long way from being realized.