WRT: Writer Response Theory

Bob Norris, administrator of the Bot Central forum, has renewed a monthly competition for producers of chatbots: The World Chatterbot Competition. This is the first monthly competition for conversational agents (that I’m aware of ), but surely not the first competition for chatbots or even other forms of elit.

Many readers of this blog would be familiar with the poem generator:?Gnoetry. It is, basically, a computer program with which a human collaborates to create new poems out of a pool of texts. It is a form of constrained writing and an experiment in human-computer collaboration.?It has been described and labeled in many ways, such?as […]

Following up on the recent discussion of IF news, here is a grab-bag of digital text art news items. Our general practice at WRT is to add interesting articles to our bookmark feed as we find them (del.icio.us/wrt), but only blog on when we have substantial commentary. We may experiment with writing a monthly […]

The terms for discussing chatbots are starting to solidify on this site, thanks to the work of Jeremy and Christy. I wanted to take some time to open up the discussion to more people and to try to formalize some of our basic terms, especially as I find myself getting to the point in my writing where I need to define them. The definitions which follow build upon a number of important posts on this site, most notably: Bots, Demons & Dolls. (These definitions represent my current use of these terms and do not reflect official WRT standards).

Conversation Agents: The broad class of agent programs written to simulate conversation through symbolic exchange.

Chatbot: A type of conversation agent that centers on keyword matching often in combination with other strategies; Conversational Reflex Agents (as defined in Russell and Norvig 41); Chat robot. Chat relates to “chat mode” in the Loebner Prize and Internet conversations, known as “chat.”

Here is a list of places that offer (mostly) free data for you to add knowledge to your bot. This can be done through a live feed and or in most cases by downloading the files for extraction from a database. I personally have not utilised these as yet but can see the benefits for […]