tshrdlu

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Authors: Jason Baldridge (jasonbaldridge@gmail.com), Nazneen Rajani, Nick Wilson

This is a repository for project related code for Applied NLP course being taught by Jason Baldridge at UT Austin. It implements a Twitter bot original written by Jason Baldridge, extended by students in the course, and then customized by Nazneen and Nick for their course project.

The name "tshrdlu" comes from Twitter+SHRDLU.

Requirements

• Version 1.6 of the Java 2 SDK (http://java.sun.com)

Configuring your environment variables

The easiest thing to do is to set the environment variables JAVA_HOME and TSHRDLU_DIR to the relevant locations on your system. Set JAVA_HOME to match the top level directory containing the Java installation you want to use.

Next, add the directory TSHRDLU_DIR/bin to your path. For example, you can set the path in your .bashrc file as follows:

export PATH=$PATH:$TSHRDLU_DIR/bin

Some functionality depends on GeoNames API access (free to sign up and use). You must create an account and set the environment variable TSHRDLU_GEONAMES_USERNAME to your GeoNames username.

If you plan to index and search objects using the provided code based on Lucene, you can customize the directory where on-disk indexes are stored (the default is the tempdir, check the directory tshrdlu) by setting the environment variable TSHRDLU_INDEX_DIR.

Once you have taken care of these things, you should be able to build and use tshrdlu.

Building the system from source

tshrdlu uses SBT (Simple Build Tool) with a standard directory structure. To build tshrdlu, type (in the TSHRDLU_DIR directory):

$ ./build update compile

This will compile the source files and put them in ./target/classes. If this is your first time running it, you will see messages about Scala being downloaded -- this is fine and expected. Once that is over, the tshrdlu code will be compiled.

To try out other build targets, do:

$ ./build

This will drop you into the SBT interface. To see the actions that are possible, hit the TAB key. (In general, you can do auto-completion on any command prefix in SBT, hurrah!)

To make sure all the tests pass, do:

$ ./build test

Documentation for SBT is at http://www.scala-sbt.org/

Note: if you have SBT already installed on your system, you can also just call it directly with "sbt" in TSHRDLU_DIR.

Setting it up

The bot must be configured with the authentication information for the Twitter user. The easiest way to do this is to create a twitter4j.properties file at the root of the source directory with the following contents:

oauth.consumerKey=<FILL THIS IN>
oauth.consumerSecret=<FILL THIS IN>
oauth.accessToken=<FILL THIS IN>
oauth.accessTokenSecret=<FILL THIS IN>

Trying it out

Run the bot:

$ tshrdlu bot

When you tweet at the bot, it attempts to determine your location, select a Twitter trend based on your location, and then reply to you with a response automatically generated based on your own tweet history and the trending topic.

To assist in testing, the bot accepts a command to set the screen name of any Twitter user as the target for user customization. The generated reply will still be sent to the user who tweets at the bot, but the reply will be customized based on the location of the configured user. To set the user, sent a tweet directed at the bot with text like so (replacing billgates with the desired screen name):

Set User: billgates