  In this paper we introduce a novel, open domain socialbot for the Amazon
Alexa Prize competition, aimed at carrying on friendly conversations with users
on a variety of topics. We present our modular system, highlighting our
different data sources and how we use the human mind as a model for data
management. Additionally we build and employ natural language understanding and
information retrieval tools and APIs to expand our knowledge bases. We describe
our semistructured, scalable framework for crafting topic-specific dialogue
flows, and give details on our dialogue management schemes and scoring
mechanisms. Finally we briefly evaluate the performance of our system and
observe the challenges that an open domain socialbot faces.
