AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is an XML-compliant language that's easy to learn, and makes it possible for you to begin customizing an Alicebot or creating one from scratch within minutes.
Its goal is to enable pattern-based, stimulus-response knowledge content to be served, received and processed on the Web and offline in the manner that is presently possible with HTML and XML. AIML has been designed for ease of implementation, ease of use by newcomers, and for interoperability with XML and XML derivatives such as XHTML.
A beginner's guide to AIML can be found in the AIML Primer. The free A.L.I.C.E. AIML includes a knowledge base of approximately 41,000 categories.
Nice to see XML in action. In this case, it is used as a way to store knowledge the bot uses.