During the course of the festival, the chatbot was continually trained and developed. Some of the biggest challenges stemmed from the non-existence of a pre-trained language model for Serbian that made the identification and generation of appropriate morpho-syntactic forms a challenge for this bot.

For example, when the human correspondent would introduce themselves as e.g. Steven to the bot, it was unable to respond with the form:

Drago mi je, Stivene.
GLAD I AM STEVEN.ACC
‘Nice to meet you, Steven.’

due to the expectation that the name in this construction should be in accusative case with corresponding morphology, so instead the bot would respond with a form requiring the nominative case:

Stiven, kako lepo ime!
STEVEN.NOM HOW BEAUTIFUL NAME
‘Steven, what a beautiful name!’

Apart from language-based challenges, we were lacking in adequate data-sources on personal details the festival visitors were curious about such as Steven Pinker’s favorite color, and we took some liberties with the monolingual Steven being able to respond in Serbian to younger festival goers which the bot ended up attributing to ‘machine translation’.