I actually built an IRC bot that did this once. It searched reddit for your question, took the first result, and posted the top comment. It worked very well for certain kinds of questions. Especially if it came from the better subreddits like askscience, but even just reddit in general.
I improved on it a lot with a whitelist of subreddits and some machine learning to select the best thread. But I was only touching on what is possible with that data.
The scope of the discussions on reddit is huge. Despite a lot of jokes in the comments here, the quality of the comments on average, is pretty decent. And the metadata like subreddit and score are extremely useful for filtering it down more.
awesome! how does one get started programming 'intelligent' things? I know how to program, haven't coded anything that is 'intelligent'. I would really love to know what all the things/concepts I should know to build a bot like yours. Thanks!
It searches reddit for whatever the user queries. Reddit returns up to 100 threads. I then choose a thread and take the top comment.
The neural network predicts which thread is most likely to produce a satisfying answer. The main features are number of n-gram matches with the question, the score, the number of comments, and some other metadata.
It's far from optimal but it does improve it a bit.
I improved on it a lot with a whitelist of subreddits and some machine learning to select the best thread. But I was only touching on what is possible with that data.
The scope of the discussions on reddit is huge. Despite a lot of jokes in the comments here, the quality of the comments on average, is pretty decent. And the metadata like subreddit and score are extremely useful for filtering it down more.