What framework can I start with to create a simple chatbot? the focus of the bot is very limited.
One can compare it with SIRI on iPhone. I want to create a simple "answering" chat which will answer questions like "give me all completed tasks so far" or "show me last completed task" or "show|list|give me my pending tasks" etc. After user asks the question I want to present the data to the user
As of now I am creating a regex dictionary of possible questions and if there is no match then I do a lucene search to find the nearest match. Am I doing it right?
This is a NLP task, and for building a system like this require lot of R&D. You can start by building a set of question that might be asked. Analyzing the questions and coming up with word patterns for each type of question. The next step would be to transform the English sentence into some form of formal structure( maybe SQL or lambda calculus). The backend DB should have the data stored in it which can be queried by the formal language.
The main problem lies in converting the English sentence to a formal language. You can start with regex and progress to make it more complex by checking Part of Speech, Syntactic structure of input sentences. Check out NLTK package for doing NLP tasks.