Natural Language Interaction

Each nano-agent can be specialized to a given task by dynamically loading additional

functions using the plugin primitive. A typical example is the natural language package

providing the developer natural language processing features such as categories extraction

A Bio-inspired Nano-Agent Architecture for Intelligent Agents 5

and template expressions (Heudin, 2007). These functions allow the design of efficient

behavior rules for implementing natural language interactions with the user. The following

code gives an illustrating example of the use of these features:

; create a list of keywords associated with the BYE category

(category “Generic” “BYE” '(“bye” “goodbye” “see you” “ciao”))

; create a list of possible answers associated with the BYE template

(template “BYE” '(

“Bye bye.”

“Goodbye human being.”

“It was a pleasure to discuss with you.”))

; create a behavior rule handling the way to answer to most kinds of “bye” sentences

(rule “goodbye” 2

; condition part

'(find? *user-input-categories* “BYE”)

; action part

'(begin

(show HAPPY 0.5)

(random-template “BYE”)))

In the next section, we describe an experiment that illustrates the use of the nano-agent

architecture: an online self-animated character that answers questions in natural language.

The Experimental Prototype