CHARLIE: An AIML-based Chatterbot which

Works as an Interface among INES and Humans

Fernando A. Mikic#1, Juan C. Burguillo#2, Martín Llamas#3, Daniel A. Rodríguez#4, Eduardo Rodríguez#5
#
Telematics Engineering Department, University of Vigo
E.T.S.I. Telecomunicación, Campus Lagoas Marcosende s/n, 36310, Vigo (Pontevedra), Spain
1
mikic@det.uvigo.es
2
jrial@det.uvigo.es
3
martin@det.uvigo.es
4
darguez@det.uvigo.es
5
edu@det.uvigo.es

Abstract— INES (INtelligent Educational System) is a functional
prototype of an online learning platform, which combines three
essential capabilities related to e-learning activities. These
capabilities are those concerning to a LMS (Learning
Management System), a LCMS (Learning Content Management
System), and an ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System). To carry out
all this functionalities, our system, as a whole, comprises a set of
different tools and technologies, as follows: semantic managing
users (administrators, teachers, students…) and contents tools,
an intelligent chatterbot able to communicate with students in
natural language, an intelligent agent based on BDI (Believes,
Desires, Intentions) technology that acts as the brain of the
system, an inference engine based on JESS (a rule engine for the
Java platform) and ontologies (to modelate the user, his/her
activities, and the learning contents) that contribute with the
semantics of the system, etc. At the present paper we will focus
on the chatterbot, CHARLIE (CHAtteR Learning Interface
Entity), developed and used in the platform, which is an AIML-
based (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) bot. We will
specifically address its performance and its contribution to INES.
I. INTRODUCTION
INES (INtelligent Educational System) is a functional
prototype of an online learning platform, which combines
three essential capabilities related to e-learning activities.
These capabilities are those concerning to a LMS (Learning
Management System), a LCMS (Learning Content
Management System), and an ITS (Intelligent Tutoring
System).
A LMS is a software application installed in a server, which
is used to manage, distribute, and supervise the educational
activities of an organization or institution. Its main functions
are to manage users, resources, and educational materials and
activities, to control the access, to supervise the learning
process and progress, to make evaluations, etc. A LMS often
does not include authoring capabilities (to develop its own
contents), which are carried out by a LCMS.
A LCMS is used to make and manage the content of a part
of an educational program (for example a course), which may
be used, managed, and personalized in different ways (for
example in different courses).
At last, an ITS is an educational support system (a kind of
virtual tutor), to help learners in their learning tasks and to
provide them with specific and adapted learning contents.
To carry out all this functionalities, our system, as a whole,
comprises a set of different tools and technologies, as follows:
semantic managing users (administrators, teachers, students…)
and contents tools, an intelligent chatterbot able to
communicate with students in natural language, an intelligent
agent based on BDI (Believes, Desires, Intentions) technology
that acts as the brain of the system, an inference engine based
on JESS (a rule engine for the Java platform) and ontologies
(to modelate the user, his/her activities, and the learning
contents) that contribute with the semantics of the system, etc.
At the present paper we will focus on the chatterbot,
CHARLIE (CHAtteR Learning Interface Entity),developed
and used in the platform, which is an AIML-based (Artificial
Intelligence Mark-up Language) bot. We will specifically
address both its performance and its contribution to INES.
This paper is organized as follows: In section II we will
address the LMSs, LCMSs, and ITSs. In section III we will
explain what an AIML based chatterbot is and we will present
A.L.I.C.E. (one of the best well known chatterbots). Section
IV will deal with our system INES. In section V we will focus
on CHARLIE. At last, we will finish with some conclusions
and future lines.
II. EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS
Talking about system devoted to education, and as we
mentioned above, we can see three main tasks groups, as
follows:
• Managing students, administrators, resources, activities,
accesses, assessments, etc. (by an LMS).
• Creating and managing educational contents (by an
LCMS).
• Tutoring, helping, and guiding students (by an ITS).
In the next sections we will briefly address each of them.
A. Learning Management Systems
An LMS can be defined as a web based software
application or technology used to plan, implement, and
evaluate a specific learning process [1].
 The Learning Management System [2] embraces all the
services for managing on-line teaching activities. In particular,
it aims to offer management functionality to training platform
users: system administrators, teachers, and students.
The services an LMS offers can be different over several
platforms, the most usual of them are:
• Administration and management of courses: inscription,
users directory, agenda, consultation of qualifications,
suggestion box, etc.
• Distribution of contents.
• Collaborative work tools: forums, chats, email lists,
electronic board, audio/video conference, etc.
• Access to online catalogues, directories, and libraries.
• Tutoring services.
• Control and evaluation users systems.
• Design of personalized formation plans.
In short, an LMS provides instructors with a way to
distribute contents, control the participation of students, and
evaluate the students learning. Besides, it provides students
with forums, chats, videoconference, etc.
B. Learning Content Management Systems
An LCMS [3] is used to design, create, and manage the
contents of an education program (usually, contents belong to
courses).
Each LCMS should provide with the following features:
• Creating content in an easy way, so experts on the
matter to teach can carry out these tasks with little effort,
even if they have not much technological experience.
• Adding different types of learning material, from simple
text to rich multimedia contents.
• Storing contents in a repository.
• Reusing and exporting contents, even to different
systems.
• Managing and making maintenance tasks over the
contents.
At this time, it is common to find systems that combine
functionalities both of LCMS and LMS. So, they agglutinate
the whole learning management related to both users (students,
teachers, and administrators) and contents.
C. Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are computer-based
instructional systems with models of instructional content that
specify what to teach, and teaching strategies that specify how
to teach. They make inferences about a student’s mastery of
topics or tasks in order to dynamically adapt the content or
style of instruction [4].
ITSs started to be developed in the 1980’s. They were
designed as a knowledge-based, intelligent tutor, to guide the
student in the process of learning; trying to emulate the way a
human tutor guides the student in his/her learning path.
An intelligent tutor is a software system that uses Artificial
Intelligence techniques to represent the knowledge and
interacts with the students in order to teach them. In the
1990’s, with the advances of cognitive psychology and the
new programming paradigms, ITSs have evolved from a mere
instructional proposal to the design of environments for
knowledge discovery and experimentation.
In spite of their advances, ITSs have not been delivered to a
general audience. This, in part, is due to the complexity
implied in their design, which has limited their practical
application. Developing and implementing an ITS is a
difficult task, since the required technology often implies most
of the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI): knowledge
representation, diagnosis, cognitive modelling, qualitative
processing, and causal modelling process. Besides, it is
necessary to have a good knowledge of the domain or topic
selected to be taught.
III. AIML-BASED CHATTERBOTS
In the last decade, we have witnessed the irruption of
A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) [5],
one of the most ground-breaking projects in the field of
Artificial Intelligence. A.L.I.C.E. is the project that produced
the AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) language
through which is possible to develop software chatterbots [6]
(A.L.I.C.E. has won the “Loebner Prize in Artificial
Intelligence Contest” [7], based on the Turing test, several
times).
Fig. 1 A.L.I.C.E.
A chatterbot is a type of conversational agent, a computer
program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation. It
processes the users’ inputs in natural language and consults its
knowledge base to make a response that imitates the human’s
one.
AIML is an XML based programming language that, as we
comment above, was specifically designed to help in the
development of A.L.I.C.E., and it is widely used in the
development of software agents that communicate with their
users in natural language.
The programming language AIML was developed by Dr.
Richard Wallace and the Alicebot open source community
among 1995 and 2000. AIML is a text file with a specific
structure, which constitutes the knowledge base of the
chatterbot. The “categories” are the fundamental knowledge
basis, and they consist of at least two elements: the “pattern”
and the “template”.
In general, the performance of AIML is based on a
stimulus-response model, in which the stimulus (the user’s
input) corresponds with the “pattern”, and the response (which
the chatterbot will show to the user) will be its associated
“template” (see Figure 2). All these actions, about looking for
the adequate pattern and showing the related template, will be
carried out by a data treatment engine, of which there are
many versions (Program D, Program E, etc.).

Fig. 2 AIML example

IV. INES (INTELLIGENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM)

INES is a functional prototype of an online learning
platform, which combines three essential capabilities related
to e-learning activities. These capabilities are those
concerning to a LMS (Learning Management System), a
LCMS (Learning Content Management System), and an ITS
(Intelligent Tutoring System).
So, INES is able to carry out a set of tasks specifics to these
three types of systems (which are analyzed in previous
sections), and that we can summarize as follows:
• Administrating and managing courses and users.
• Creating, managing, and delivering contents.
• Tutoring and helping students in a personalized way.
The main parts that make up INES can be grouped in
several blocks (see Figure 3):
• Ontology: There is an ontology to semantically defining
the contents of the courses (by a subontology based on
LOM [8]), the users of the platform, and their relations.
• Contents and users managing module: This module
allow administrators to manage both the users of the
system and the contents of the courses.
• Inference engine: It processes the requests of the BDI
agent and decides what it is allowed to do.
• BDI agent: It is the real brain of the system. It is based
on BDI technology [9], and it is responsible for taking
personalized decisions about the education of every
student in an intelligent way.
• Chatterbot: It is responsible for communicating with
students (we will focus on it in the next section).
Fig. 3 Block diagram of INES.
V. CHARLIE (CHATTER LEARNING INTERFACE ENTITY )
CHARLIE (CHAtter Learning Interface Entity) is a
chatterbot responsible for interface tasks among INES and the
students, i.e. it is the part of our system that directly
communicates with the students in natural language.
A. General Characteristics
Our chatterbot has been developed using A.L.I.C.E.
technology, and so its brain is composed by a set of AIML
files, that are simple stimulus-response modules (see section
III). It is based on Program D [10] and it uses AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) technology [11], that
enables to make interactive applications or RIA (Rich Internet
Applications). This technique enables our bot to maintain an
asynchronous communication with the server in the
background, and so, it is possible to make changes on the web
page without reloading it. This means a significant
improvement of the interactivity, speed, and usability.
Inside our e-learning platform (INES), the chatterbot
(CHARLIE) carries out user interface functions, i.e. provides
students with a way to communicate with the system in
natural language. Referring to the CHARLIE architecture at
the highest level of abstraction, our chatterbot consists of a
Bot User Interface (BUI), an interpreter, and an AIML
database. Figure 4 shows us the architecture with the main
elements involved in the system.
Fig. 4 Architecture of the chatterbot CHARLIE inside INES
The students are able to connect to the e-learning platform
through the Internet and they will interact with the bot through
the BUI (the Bot User Interface is a text box where the
students can input their utterances). The bot gets input data
from this BUI and decides what to do next searching into its
knowledge source. Two cases can arise:
• The bot find in its knowledge base suitable content to
answer the student.
• The bot find in its knowledge base instructions to send
the user’s input to the system and to wait the answer of
it. When it receives the response, it processes it and it
answers the student.
A. Performance of CHARLIE
To explain in detail the functionality of CHARLIE we will
consider two points of view: the administrator’s point of view
and the students’ one.
1) Administrator’s point of view: The administrator is able
to manage the bot through a specific managing module. This
module offers a friendly interface for selecting the general
AIML files to be loaded. Besides, it is possible to customize
the bot giving it a name, hobbies, home town, birthday, etc.
and a background image for the conversation window (see
Figure 5). Taken all together, this makes the bot more human
to interact with the students.
Fig. 5 Customizing the bot
Another administrator’s task is to load specific content for a
course in the knowledge base of the bot. This content is the
one that (as we comment above) sends the student’s input to
the system to be processed, and that waits for the
corresponding response (the rest of the content of the
knowledge base of the bot is used for supporting a
conversation with the student). To do that, CHARLIE has an
interface where the administrator can select resources from a
structure of modules and insert several keywords to identify
those resources. So, if the student uses some of these
keywords in his/her input the bot will be able to carry out the
appropriate actions.
The administrator can introduce himselves/herselves the
keywords, but initially he/she will be recommended by an
automatic syntactic analyzer. The first time that a specific
knowledge is associated to a bot, a syntactic analysis is
performed and the keywords are shown, i.e. the syntactic
analyzer is used to obtain a recommendation of
keywords/concepts related to the course content. Here,
FreeLing 1.5 [12] is employed, an open source linguistic
analyzer.
The reasons to choose this analyzer are the following:
• Open source.
• Online available.
• Versatile and sound.
• Simply to install and make operational.
• Modular (which permits changes of the syntactic
analyzer in future versions of the bot).
• Supported by several languages (which permits changes
of the syntactic analyzer in future versions of the bot).
Another important characteristic of CHARLIE is the
possibility of asking questions to the students, wich will be
assigned to the platform's resources (obviously, every
question must have at least one associated answer). These
questions will be good to help students to realize what
sections of a course are more important, and to train them for
test exams that they will must to do throughout the course.
Whenever a question (and its answer) is assigned to a resource,
it must be added to the AIML database of the bot (in order to
do this, functions were developed).
When a set of questions were stored it is possible to define
tests (see Figure 6), which consist in several questions
selected from those created.
Fig. 6 Tests manage
2) Student’s point of view: The bot gives students the
opportunity of interacting with the e-learning platform in
natural language. As we mentioned above, this interaction
between INES and a student carries out across a pop-up
window with a text area reflecting the conversation and a text
box to introduce new requests So, the students are able to
maintain a conversation with the bot, which can be a general
conversation (thanks to a set of predefined AIML files that
contain general information) or a specific one related to the
content of a course.
If the bot does not detect any input related to the content of
a course, it answers to the students with an expression taken
from its general knowledge base. Once the bot detects a reply
from the student, where he/she has used a special keyword
(related to a learning resource of a course), the bot will
recover the previously established association defined by the
administrator and will carry out the appropriate actions.
Besides, while a student is talking to the bot, he/she can
request several activities related to tests:
• Ask for a test: The bot chooses one over all the tests the
administrator had created.
• Ask for a personalized test: The student must choose the
number of questions the test will include and the bot
will create the test that fits this requisite.
• Ask for questions that do not belong to a test (free
questions): The bot starts to ask questions and keeps on
it until the student wants to stop (see Figure 7).
Fig. 7 Asking for free questions
VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
The more important contribution of this paper is the
presentation of a functional prototype of e-learning platform
(called INES), which includes LMS, CMS, and ITS
capabilities; and more specifically, the presentation of its user
interface. This interface is a chatterbot (called CHARLIE),
which is an AIML based agent able to communicate with
students in natural language.
CHARLIE is able to maintain a general conversation with
students, showing them contents of courses, and asking them
questions about the learning material.
The main future work related to CHARLIE is the upgrade
of its knowledge base to support semantic content. This entails
an upgrade of the AIML language and the development of a [2] A. Grace, T. Butler, Beyond Knowledge Management: Introducing
Learning Management Systems, Idea Group Publishing, 2005.
new interpreter (possibly called Program G). Besides, we will
[3] W. K. Horton, Designing Web-Based Training: How to Teach Anyone
try to achieve CHARLIE can talk in several languages. Anything Anywhere Anytime, John Wiley and Sons, 2000.
[4] T. Murray, “Authoring Intelligent Tutoring Systems: An Analysis of
VII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT the State of the Art”, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in
Education, 10, 98-129, 1999.
This work has been funded by Ministerio de Educación y [5] A.L.I.C.E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation. [Online].
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