Development of a Framework for AIML Chatbots inHTML5 and Javascript

Abstract: Chatbots are software agents that interact with the user in a conversation. The main goal of their creation was to resemble a human being in the way they perform said interaction, trying to make the user think he/she is writing to another human being. This has been implemented with varying degrees of success. One of the most popular languages for the definition of a chatbot knowledge base is AIML.This thesis focuses on the implementation of an AIML interpreter written in Javascript to allow for a web-based client-side specific usage of AIML chatbots. The interpreter must guarantee the compliance of properly formed AIML documents, perform all the necessary pre-processing duties for the correct usage of the chatbot and ensure the correctness of both pattern matching of user input and chatbot response.The interpreter fully exploits the DOM tree manipulation functions of the jQuery library to achieve said goals, treating AIML files as if they were normal XML files. The result is a well performing, fully functional AIML interpreter tailored around AIML 1.0 specification.