Helping bots 'get it' – Digg Data

During my time at betaworks last summer, I worked on extracting principal topics from messages that Digg's Facebook Messenger Bot received. This post explains a topic extraction method I created specifically for chat messages, which we later used to develop RIO -- a topic mining engine that uses reinforcement to tune its algorithm and automatically predict tags for chat messages and news articles. Conversational bots today understand user messages only when rules are hard-coded to match the exact message pattern. Such scripted bots find it hard to scale and can be frustrating for users who want to have a basic natural language exchange with the bot. Every bot provides a service (for Digg this is news), but users don't necessarily restrict their messages to that.