Description

This repository contains a dialogue chat bot, which is able to:

• answer programming-related questions (using StackOverflow dataset);
• chit-chat and simulate dialogue on all non programming-related questions.

For a chit-chat mode we will use a pre-trained neural network engine available from ChatterBot. For the programming-related questions mode we will train a classifier that will predict exactly one tag (=programming language) and will be also based on Logistic Regression with TF-IDF features. Then we rank questions using embeddings to calculate similarity between the question and existing threads (question on StackOverflow).

Installation

• Run the week5-project.ipynb to generate train models.
• Run the main_bot.py by passing the token of your telegram bot as an argument. See doc here. to learn how to create a telegram bot.

python3 install main_bot.py --token "your_token_here"

Troubleshooting

Bot crashes with the unicode error

If your bot code crashes with the error that ends with UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character, your terminal likely has problems showing unicode symbols. To fix this you can change your terminal local by adding the following lines to you ~/.bashrc file (or any other shell configuration):

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

To verify the effect, you can run the following command end check that it outputs 'utf-8'

> python -c 'import locale; print(locale.getpreferredencoding())'
utf-8

You can find more details in this article.

If this doesn't work, you can explicitly specify the encoding when opening files:

with open(filename, 'r', encoding="utf-8") as file:
  ...