History of chatbots dates back to 1966 when a computer program called ELIZA was invented by Weizenbaum. It imitated the language of a psychotherapist from only 200 lines of code. You can still converse with it here: Eliza.
On similar lines let's create a very basic chatbot utlising the Python's NLTK library.It's a very simple bot with hardly any cognitive skills,but still a good way to get into NLP and get to know about chatbots.
NLTK(Natural Language Toolkit)
Natural Language Processing with Python provides a practical introduction to programming for language processing.
For platform-specific instructions, read here
pip install nltk
After NLTK has been downloaded, install required packages
import nltk
from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer
nltk.download('popular', quiet=True) # for downloading popular packages
nltk.download('punkt')
nltk.download('wordnet')
You can run the chatbot.ipynb which also includes step by step i 5226 nstructions.
- Through Terminal
python chatbot.py