Code a Story, Train a Bot¶

Learning Objectives

After today's activity, you should be able to:

Explain the process of editing and running a Python program.
Write simple Python programs that use print() and input().
Train a chatbot by providing a variety of sample conversations.
Describe how training data impacts the capability of a chatbot.

Python Basics¶

# How to input and output
name = input("Your name? ")
print("Hello", name + "!")

Story Generator¶

Starter Code: story.py

import random

# Define lists of phrases which will help build a story.
start = [
    "Once upon a time,",
]
character = [
    "there lived a child.",
]
time = [
    "One day",
]
story_plot = [
    "she was wandering near",
]
place = [
    "the river, where",
]
second_character = [
    "she saw a small bird,",
]
age = [
    "shivering and wet,",
]
work = [
    "searching for something.",
]

# Choose a random item from each list and print the story.
print(
    random.choice(start),
    random.choice(character),
    random.choice(time),
    random.choice(story_plot),
    random.choice(place),
    random.choice(second_character),
    random.choice(age),
    random.choice(work)
)

Code for Exercise #3

Add this line at the top:
```
import textwrap
```
Replace print( with:
```
story = " ".join([
```

Replace the ) with:

])
print(textwrap.fill(story, width=72))

Going Further¶

Simple Chatbot¶

Installation Commands

Run each command (in the Shell) after creating a venv.

!pip install chatterbot chatterbot_corpus pyyaml

!python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

Starter Code: chat.py

from chatterbot import ChatBot
from chatterbot.trainers import ListTrainer

# Name the bot
name = "ChatJMU"
bot = ChatBot(name)

# Train the bot
trainer = ListTrainer(bot)
trainer.train([
    'How are you?',
    'I am good.',
    'What do you like?',
    'Python programming',
    'Thank you.',
    'You are welcome.',
])

# Conversation loop
while True:
    print()  # blank line
    request = input("You: ")
    response = bot.get_response(request)
    print(name + ":", response)

Code for Exercise #5

Add this after the other imports:

from chatterbot.trainers import ChatterBotCorpusTrainer

Add this above the conversation loop:

trainer = ChatterBotCorpusTrainer(bot)
trainer.train("chatterbot.corpus.english")