What’s best way to train an chatbot (e.g. alicebot)?
A “chat log” and AIML file are two different things. Since a chat log should contain both questions and answers, you will have question-answer pairs, which should be enough for statistical/probabilistic analysis. For instance, the University of Southern California (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) “Virtual Human Toolkit” (vhtoolkit.ict.usc.edu) includes “NPCEditor”, a tool for building question-answering characters based on statistical language modeling (probabilistic relevance models). An AIML file is a pattern matching system, and I know of no work done applying machine learning to AIML per se; however, chat logs are produced by chatbots such as Alicebot.