Suppose you had a database listing authorship and reported speech in the Bible, so that, for each set of words, you know who said or wrote them (the ESV folks did this using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a few years back, and Jim Albright’s Dramatizer has similar data embedded in it). I assume the speakers have standardized identifiers.
Now imagine a matching algorithm (there are lots of candidates out there) that, when provided with either a question or a list of words, and optionally a speaker, retrieves passages that best match the input.
Example: “why does God allow evil?” might return
- Eliphaz the Temanite: Job 15:14-16
- the woman of Tekoa: 2 Sam 14:14
- the apostle John: 1 John 3:11-17
Querying about “what about God and evil?” with speaker=Jesus might (in the best case) give answers like
- Matt 5:45
- Matt 12:35
Apart from how accurate such answers might be (that depends on the sophistication of the matching algorithm), you’ve now got the engine for a chatbot that gives Biblical “answers” . Aside from perhaps being an interesting hack, would this be useful? Lazyweb, are you listening?