»Respektomat« is an arts project devised as contribution for the 2019 member exhibition of Poly Produzentengalerie e.V., Karlsruhe, Germany, on December 6, 2019. The exhibition is titled »Respekt«.
»Respektomat« is a text console based, interactive program for discussing the topic with the computer. The technology behind it somewhat resembles concepts of good old Joseph Weizenbaum's »ELIZA«[1] processor. Still, there are some significant differences:
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While »ELIZA« uses a setting with psychotherapist to talk to, the »Respektomat« is rather an interactive information system and talk bot on the specific topic of “respect”.
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While »ELIZA« tries in many cases to create sentences by pattern matching and replacing from the user's input, »Respektomat« instead analyzes the user's input for searching for the best matching statement from a big database to be used as a response to the user's input.
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While »ELIZA« is based on English language and heavily depends on its grammatical structure, »Respektomat« uses German as language, but should be portable to other languages with minimal effort. Note, for example, that »ELIZA« depends on constructing subclauses from a main clause. In English language, this is relatively easy. For example, you can take the main clause “today it is raining” and turning it into a subclause by prepending e.g. the word “if”: “if today it is raining, then …”. In German language, this is not directly possible, but the sentence must be rephrased. For example, the main clause “heute regnet es”, it must be rephrased as “falls es heute regnet, dann …” (instead of “falls heute regnet es, dann …”) when prepending the conditional word “falls”. To avoid this trouble, »Respektomat« does not at all try to construct a new sentence from scratch as answer, but instead tries selecting the best fitting sentence from a database with a huge, fixed set of predefined sentences and uses that best match as answer.
Fig. 1: Screenshot of Typical Conversation
[1] Wikipedia: ELIZA. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA (last visited on: 2019-11-17).