How does the chatbot jabberwacky work?

How does the chatbot jabberwacky work?

I’ve previously answered a similar Quora question, “How does Cleverbot work?” [1], and have since blogged “My Cleverbot Tweet-FAQ” [2]. Both Jabberwacky and Cleverbot were created by Rollo Carpenter [3]. Jabberwacky [4] was created first (1997) by his Icogno.com and Cleverbot [5] later (2008) by Existor.com . Presumably Rollo is on Twitter at Existor [6]. Notably, Rollo won the Loebner Prize in 2005 and 2006 with Jabberwacky / Icogno technology. Jabberwacky / Icogno technology is now behind both LifeNaut.com and LiveEnglish.ru .

Supposedly, Cleverbot is a variant of Jabberwacky, but more fuzzy and with deeper context. As for how Jabberwacky learns, Antonella De Angeli [7] and Sheryl Brahnam [8] published a 2008 academic paper, “I hate you! Disinhibition with virtual partners” [9], essentially an extensive analysis of the Jabberwacky knowledgebase. They state that “it learns by association, storing replies to inputs in a database”. For instance, Cleverbot uses 4d.com (4D v11 SQL).

I have posted a webpage, an informal survey of the past 10 years of academic work mentioning Jabberwacky [10]. Jabberwacky is generally considered to use an AI technique called “contextual pattern matching”. I have not found evidence of any specific machine learning algorithms used in Jabberwacky; however, Jayen Ashar completed a 2010 PhD thesis entitled, “Online Learning in Conversational Agents” [11], essentially a literature review, which provides an overview of the field.

[1] How does Cleverbot work?

[2] http://www.mendicott.com/2011/07/my-cleverbot-tweet-faq.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollo_Carpenter

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwacky

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleverbot

[6] http://twitter.com/existor

[7] http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/a/Angeli:Antonella_De.html

[8] http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Brahnam:Sheryl.html

[9] http://dac.escet.urjc.es/rvmaster/rvmaster/asignaturas/articulo.pdf

[10] http://www.meta-guide.com/home/bibliography/google-scholar/jabberwacky

[11] http://jayen.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/phd/litreview.pdf