scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
Hi there!
Andy Edmonds says:
What is a horse?
scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
A horse is a large single-hooved mammal known for its speed, strength, beauty, and gentle nature. Humans ride about on them sometimes.
Andy Edmonds says:
What is a pony?
scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
I beg your pardon?
So AIML bots don't know that a pony is a kind of horse. If they knew that, they could answer either with some text specially for ponies, or could respond:
A pony is a kind of horse. A horse is a large....
How can we give ScientioBot this kind of knowledge? Well if you look at the other things we do, you'll see that the product ConceptMine relies on using 'is a kind of' or hypernymy relationships to create it's signatures for documents.
The source for this knowledge is Princeton's wonderful WordNet. We have created a OO model of this for internal use, and we've added this to ScientioBot. It's actually fairly easy to do. AIML has a sort of graveyard rule that gets called if everything else fails. We catch this state and perform a lookup for the key word in our model of WordNet. We then recurse through the various noun concepts that are associated with the word and then up to the hypernym of that word, untill we find an AIML rule that actually fires. An example is:
Andy Edmonds says:
What is your version?
scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
This is ScientioBot1.1.
Andy Edmonds says:
What is a pony?
scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
a pony is a kind of horse. A horse is a large single-hooved mammal known for its speed, strength, beauty, and gentle nature. Humans ride about on them sometimes.
Andy Edmonds says:
What is an aardvark
scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
a aardvark is a kind of placental. a placental is a kind of mammal. A mammal is a warm blooded vertebrate born alive and nourished with milk.
As you can see, in this case the AIML rule set didn't know what an aardvark was, so ScientioBot looked up the hypernym in WordNet. The AIML rule set didn't know what a placental was, so ScientioBot looked again till it found a mammal, and the AIML rule set did know what that was.
In effect we've added another 40,000 new rules to AIML.
One last example:
Andy Edmonds says:
What is an albatross
scientiobot@scientio.com (E-mail address not verified) says:
a albatross is a kind of pelagic bird. a pelagic bird is a kind of seabird. a seabird is a kind of aquatic bird. a aquatic bird is a kind of bird. They are thought to be descendants of dinosaurs.
So we've made a large initial step in adding hierachical knowledge to ScientioBot.