Natural language generation

Natural language can be defined as a conversational tone in a bot's response. The purpose here is not to hide the fact that the bot is not human, but to make the information easier to digest.

The flavorText variable from the previous snippet is an attempt to make the bot's responses sound more natural; in addition, it is a useful technique to cheat our way out of performing more complex processing to reach a conversational tone in our response.

Take the following example:

Weatherbot's politician-like response

Notice how the first weather query is asking whether it's cold or not. Weatherbot gets around giving a yes or no answer by making a generic statement on the temperature to every question.

This might seem like a cheat, but it is important to remember a very important aspect of NLP. The more complex the generated language, the more likely it is to go wrong. Generic answers are better than outright wrong answers.

This particular problem could be solved by adding more...