DISCLAIMER: this is a purely educational project. This product is not intended to act any form of counsel. It is based off unqualified data and is purely experimental. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, please seek professional help. See https://www.everydayhealth.com/depression/guide/resources/ for a list of resources available.
Annie is a chatbot built using the Natural Language Toolkit(Python NLTK). The idea behind Annie is to see if I could train an issue-specific chatbot based off reddit data. I wanted to see if it is possible to create a chatbot that delivers appropriate responses to questions concerning topics of anxiety, depression, stress etc.
Using PRAW(Python Reddit API Wrapper) I extracted the top 1000 posts from subreddits such as r/depression, r/anxiety, r/stress, r/CasualConversation etc. I then took the the post title as the question and the top comment as the most effective reply. This way we have 1000's of questions and answers(most of the time) that reddit-users consider to be the most noteworthy. This is the corpus with which I trained the chatbot. Sometimes, this is extremely effective, as is displayed in the screenshots below. But sometimes the responses to the user-defined questions are just completely non-sensical. This is almost always due to the fact that the top comment sometimes pertains to the post's subtext, not the title. This data is then stored in a Pandas dataframe. The data is normalised and lemmatised. A new column is created in the dataframe for a bag-of-words representation of the post tile that describes the occurrence of words within the title. When the user asks a question, the question goes through the same data processing as above and is the BOW of this question is then checked, using cosine similarity, to see what is the post similar post title to the user question. The corresponding top comment is then delivered as a response by Annie.
Clone this repository and use the command:
$ python3 chatbot.py
This will boot the simple TkInter interface. You can now interact with Annie! Try to have fun 😊.
Note: you can make your own corpus using the reddit scraper(reddit_scraper/scraper.py). This way you can select your own subreddits and the number of comments you want to use.