Here is my new bot:
The Most Successful Bot I've Met. It's based on a
sort of stale meme, but
Smidgeo inspired me. Basically, the theme of the meme is lists of Successmanship-style tips from the land of workplace motivational posters.
The bot
uses a lot of
ConceptNet, which is neat, but the concepts have no guarantees about which verb tenses or other grammatical forms they'll be in, so making sentences with them isn't straightforward.
At one point, I started "canonicalizing" the verbs at the starts of all of the concepts (via
Wordnik and a lot of "does this word end in -ing or -ed?"), so that they all worked as phrases that would follow the plural subject "People I've met". e.g. "Bringing home the bacon" => "bring home the bacon" so that "The most successful people I've met bring home the bacon" would work.
That actually made them harder to use in the rest of the sentence when I was using ConceptNet relationships to work in multiple concepts in a sentence. However, without any canonicalization, the sentences were impossible to parse. So, I ended up canonicalizing just the verb in the first concept used, the one that connects to "People I've met…" I think that if you don't lose a reader (or at least me) at the beginning of the sentence, they're more forgiving about the rest of it. Also, some amount of grammatical wonkiness lends it some personality.