Fundamentals

Main concepts of the AIML language are:

AIML Tags

Following are the important tags which are commonly used in AIML documents.

• <aiml> : Defines the beginning and end of a AIML document.
• <category> : Defines the unit of knowledge in Alicebot's knowledge base.
• <pattern> : Defines the pattern to match what a user may input to an Alicebot.
• <template> : Defines the response of an Alicebot to user's input.

Following are some of the other widely used aiml tags. We'll be discussing each tag in details in coming chapters.

• <star> : Used to match wild card * character(s) in the <pattern> Tag.
• <srai> : Multipurpose tag, used to call/match the other categories.
• <random> : Used <random> to get random responses.
• <li> : Used to represent multiple responses.
• <set> : Used to set value in an AIML variable.
• <get> : Used to get value stored in an AIML variable.
• <that> : Used in AIML to respond based on the context.
• <topic> : Used in AIML to store a context so that later conversation can be done based on that context.
• <think> : Used in AIML to store a variable without notifying the user.
• <condition> : Similar to switch statements in programming language. It helps ALICE to respond to matching input.