Victus Spiritus

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Read Write Social Bot

23 Dec 2009

Update: Some breaking news that's fantastic

The Zemanta team (ala @Andraz) has crafted Galaxy, a relational connector between Zemanta and DBpedia + Freebase. This could save me a jump time from entities to connectors! Just heard about it from twitter, here's the full blog post with all the cool details. Unfortunately there's no API for such a connection, so we'll have to do it ourselves anyway. At least I'm aware of the DBpedia and Freebase now.

Crafting a bot that can read & respond with a personality

Artificial intelligence has come a long way in my lifetime, certainly specialized processing such as chess programs have surpassed human cognitive ability. Late yesterday, inspired by the work of my colleague Tyler, I proceeded down a path few have tread successfully. The challenge chosen is to craft an interactive social bot.

Here are the modules I'm using and why I believe it's possible:
1) semantic entity extraction allows us to quickly identify a category/type and specific person, place or thing
2) relational semantic lookups give multiple connections between entities in the form of verbs or analogies
3) corpus linguistics or a search API can weave a series of entities and verbs together
4) simple replacement rules can serve as the style, speech, or accent.
5) the spooky hard part is making all these pieces play together. I have some ideas, but I'm interested to see what others are cooking up.

Why?

In an effort to improve the appeal and utility of the IMM, we're exploring new ways of looking at social search. An interface that one can send and recieve messages from is both desirable and natural.

The Hunch interface, and API could serve as a potential source of answers. Hunch is founded on a basic assumption: if you have the same priorities as other folks, their solutions are likely to be good options for you. If you capture the important factors this architecture works. I appreciate the founder Chris Dixon's blog and suspect good stuff from this service.