Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet.
A bot performs tasks that are simple and extremely repetitive – the advantage is that these tasks can be performed at a much higher rate than possible for any human (yes, I know some of us are pretty damn fast when poking on a keyboard ?). The largest use of bots is made during web spidering, when an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers.
In this blog, when referring to Internet bots we usually refer to chat bots. A chat bot is an application designed to simulate human conversations that might use – at some point- artificial intelligence. Chat bots are designed to interact with real people or to exchange information with other automatas. Our work with the plugin WordLift is to help people organize and structure their knowledge so that it can be exposed to machines, such as chat bots, crawlers and smart agents.
Chat bots – when using artificial intelligence – access to deep vocabularies such as the ones that WordLift creates to interact with users. Chat bots use a technology called natural language generation (NLG) to create natural language sentences.