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The CARTMAN project
CARTMAN (`Conversation by Augmented Regular Text Matching Networks') is a set of tools that
allows human-computer dialogue agents to be created. These agents give an illusion of
real conversation, by following a pre-determined scripts with multiple alternative
pathways. Although CARTMAN dialogue agents have no real `intelligence' in the
`strong AI' sense, they do allow useful exchanges between human and computer.
CARTMAN is designed to operate in the World-Wide Web environment, and therefore has
applications in distance learning and techical support, for example, but the
same dialogue specification can also produce stand-alone dialogue agents.
CARTMAN uses pattern-matching techniques to classify user input. Part of the
project is the development of a pattern-matching language which is simple
enough to match single words and pre-defined phrases in an intuitive way,
but powerful enough to allow matches against complex parse structures.
An overview of the CARTMAN project can be found in
this technical report.
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