Hello everyone,

I’d loke to ask what sorts of books rearding chatbots I should start reading to make my own one? I’m not a CS professional but I know C++/STL, Java and Python. I’ve also read books on data structures and algorithms and I’ve done some Coursera courses on that.

What I don’t know is what I should read about language processing - books on NLP such as Juravsky’s book? NTLK? AI? Machine learning? It’s an ocean of information and I don’t know where to dive

What do I want: I work for a university and I want to write a chatbot that can answer question regarding the application/admission. Please don’t take into consideration if the bot will be a web-based or standalone. I’m doing it for my purposes only so let’s assume I just want to have a py file or a cpp file or somthing that can be a chatbot. But again, as I’ve said, I’d like to know what to start from in chatbot theory, not programming languages.

Thanks in advance for any answers. Sorry if I breach any guidelines, this is my first message here

Welcome Alexander,
You might start with:
How To Create Your Own Customised Chatbot For Beginners - Chatbots 101
https://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/492/

Unless you want to build your own system/interpreter, you do not really need much knowledge about NLP or machine learning. You are using an input pattern and response (which you build from the Q&As; on your university admission site).
The input/responses are usually called volleys.

You could do it with a modification of NLTK’s chat package.
http://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.chat.html

A step up from this is AIML, Chatscript, or RiveScript. Each have their own systems and languages. The choice of which has as much to do with how you want to deploy and what programming language you like as anything else.

Hello Merlin,

Thanks for the reply. I do want to build my own system. Well, maybe I don’t now, but I do want to understand what happens under the hood of all the libraries that I use to be able to maybe modify something if I need or to write my own version if libs are not modifiable.

My ‘project’ is pure enthusiasm. My college major was linguistics and now I’m a CS hobbyist so I want to somehow merge these things.