ECTOR is a software bot, which aim is to chat intelligently with a user.
It is the "son" of Achille, will use some BAsCET features.
I began writing it in Java.
Not finished yet (1999-06-23).
I've written it in PHP/MySQL in order to give access to much more people... by the web. There is an ECTOR project on SourceForge.
There is now a C version, which is more accurate, although still a bit slow to answer, which I call cECTOR.
ECTOR is an acronym standing for the French Entité Cybernétique Totalement Obligée de Réfléchir (Cybernetic entity totally compelled to think). Sir Ector was an Arthurian hero. Hector was also a Trojan hero, Achilles' enemy. Actually Achilles killed Hector, but I hope here, they will make peace (Achille is a kind of ECTOR's ancestor).
ECTOR is based on an artificial intelligence architecture, I called BAsCET (in my French PhD Thesis), that is inspired from Copycat, an AI system from Mitchell and Hofstadter.
It is a mix between neural and semantic networks, uses agents and a blackboard. Its Concept Network uses co-occurrences to compute influences of one semantic node on another.
ECTOR is an application of BAsCET to the language... So it has proper techniques, as, for example, the integration of words in the Concept Network or the higher level node creation.