Dumbbot is a website-based bot that was written for the September 2018 Codejam held by the Stevens Computer Science Club. The program is designed around the theme "parodies" in that it is a parody of Cleverbot, a chatbot that responds to user messages. I have parodied it by training a bot that also takes in user responses, and yields a response,
The bot is powered by a recurrent neural network that, given a segment of a conversation, generates the next character of the conversation. By repeating this operation, the program is capable of generating a response to a given query.
To setup a Dumbbot server on your machine, you will require Python 3 and NodeJS. You will also need NPM and Pip for installing libraries.
First, you will need to download the Cornell Movie Dialog Corpus. Once it is downloaded, extract it to a directory of your choice. There should be some text files inside, notably movie_lines.txt and movie_lines.txt. Supposing the path to these files is /path/to/cornell (ex: movie lines is at /path/to/cornell/movie_lines.txt), we wan move on.
Once the requirements are met, you will need to do the following:
pip install keras # Keras is a deep learning API
npm install # Initializes the node modules
Once this is done, you will need to generate the dataset and train the model. If you use the training program, this is all handled for you. By default, you can train the model with:
python model/train.py -d /path/to/cornell -t 5000
This will run the model for 5000 iteration. During each iteration, a number of conversations will be processed for sequential movie lines and fed to the model. The first time the model is run, it may take a while to start. This is because it will need to generate the processed data. When it is generated, the dataset will be saved in the same directory as the Cornell dataset as a pair of .pkl files that contain an encoding of the data. A file charset.txt will also be created in the current directoy, and is used to map between characters and the input embedding.
To generate text manually, one can run python model/model.py -i "Your text here".
This command is invoked by the NodeJS server when a request is made.
To run the server, simply run npm start. You can also use nodemon app.js
if you prefer to use nodemon.
By default, the server is hosted on port 80. This can be changed in app.js.