Building a basic chatbot with keyword matching

In this recipe, we will build a very basic chatbot that uses keywords to match inquiries and responses. This is based on the NLTK Chat class.

Getting ready

We will start by creating a new chat class and initializing it with pairs of responses. Then, we will run it on the command line. If you haven't already, you will need to install the nltk package:

pip install nltk

How to do it…

We will use the NLTK chat framework to create a simple chatbot. First, we will create the question-answer pairs and then create the Chat object. We will then use it to converse with the bot:

1. Do the necessary imports:

   from nltk.chat.util import Chat, reflections

2. Initialize the conversation pairs:

   pairs = [[r".*hi|hello|hey|what's up.*", 
            ["Hello, I am a simple chatbot. How are you?"]],
            [r&apos...