Introduction

"ZEBEL" (pronounced like "rebel") is an intelligent IRC bot.

Its primary goal is gathering intelligence and secrets through contextual analysis of the conversations on IRC. I almost got you! :-)

Jokes aside, Zebel is a simple IRC bot that whenever you talk to him, tries to reply with a relatively relevant message. If you're curious, drop by in #zebel on irc.freenode.org and have a chat with him.

Design

When someone in an IRC channel, talks to Zebel, e.g. sends out a public message like zebel: greetings, Zebel tries to make sense of your message as below:

1. It first sanitises the message; removing stop words, punctuations and unimportant words.
2. The sanitised text is fed into natural language processing to determine each word's role in the sentence.
3. For each word and its given role, the list of synonyms are extracted from NLP database.
4. The words along with their synonyms are forged into a query.
5. A full-text search on the DB is performed.
6. If anything relevant enough is found, it is returned.
7. If there's no relevant enough answer in the database, a fuzzy search for the original message is performed.
8. If fuzzy search finds a good enough answer, it is returned.
9. Even if fuzzy search can't help, Zebel simply gives up on finding a reasonable answer and instead just picks up a message from the "confused" category.

Implementation

Zebel, developed with Python 3.4+, is composed of 3 main parts:

1. The IRC client (irc library)
2. The database (ElasticSearch)
3. The text and natural language processing unit (nltk library)

How To Run

If you plan to run your own Zebel instance:

1. Install Python 3.4
2. Create a virtual environment for Zebel, e.g. pyvenv-3.4 .venv
3. Activate the venv, e.g. source .venv/bin/activate
4. Clone Zebel.
5. Install required packages, e.g. cd zebel && pip install -r requirements.txt
6. Install nltk data, e.g. python -m nltk.downloader all. Warning: this downloads quite a bit of data.
7. Edit zebel.ini to your needs.
8. Install and run ElasticSearch.
9. Import Zebel's quotes and messages into ElasticSearch, e.g. data/drop-import-all.sh
10. Run Zebel, e.g. cd zebel && python main.py

Notes

• The bot named "vandusen" in #chicken on FreeNode was a great inspiration to me.