ELIZA

For other uses, see ELIZA (disambiguation).
A conversation with Eliza

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967[1] at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.[2][3] Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party.[4][5][6] Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally)[7] in MAD-SLIP, the pattern matching directives that contained most of its language capability were provided in separate "scripts", represented in a lisp-like representation.[8] The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient's words to the patient),[9][10][11] and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots ("chatbot" modernly) and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test.[12][13]

ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.[3] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[3][14] While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding.[15] However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.[6] The original ELIZA source-code had been missing since its creation in the 1960s as it was not common to publish articles that included source code at that time. However, more recently the MAD-SLIP source-code has now been discovered in the MIT archives and published on various platforms, such as archive.org.[16] The source-code is of high historical interest since it demonstrates not only the specificity of programming languages and techniques at that time, but also the beginning of software layering and abstraction as a means of achieving sophisticated software programming.

  1. ^ "Alan Turing at 100". Harvard Gazette. 13 September 2012. Retrieved 2016-02-22.
  2. ^ Berry, David M. (2018). "Weizenbaum, ELIZA and the End of Human Reason". In Baranovska, Marianna; Höltgen, Stefan (eds.). Hello, I'm Eliza: Fünfzig Jahre Gespräche mit Computern [Hello, I'm Eliza: Fifty Years of Conversations with Computers] (in German) (1st ed.). Berlin: Projekt Verlag. pp. 53–70. ISBN 9783897334670.
  3. ^ a b c Weizenbaum, Joseph (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. ISBN 0-7167-0464-1.
  4. ^ Norvig, Peter (1992). Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. New York: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. pp. 151–154. ISBN 1-55860-191-0.
  5. ^ Weizenbaum, Joseph (January 1966). "ELIZA--A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 9: 36–45. doi:10.1145/365153.365168. S2CID 1896290 – via universelle-automation.
  6. ^ a b Baranovska, Marianna; Höltgen, Stefan, eds. (2018). Hello, I'm Eliza fünfzig Jahre Gespräche mit Computern (1st ed.). Bochum: Bochum Freiburg projektverlag. ISBN 978-3-89733-467-0. OCLC 1080933718.
  7. ^ "ELIZAGEN - The Original ELIZA". sites.google.com. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  8. ^ Berry, David M. (2023-11-06). "The Limits of Computation: Joseph Weizenbaum and the ELIZA Chatbot". Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society. 3 (3). doi:10.34669/WI.WJDS/3.3.2. ISSN 2748-5625.
  9. ^ Dillon, Sarah (2020-01-02). "The Eliza effect and its dangers: from demystification to gender critique". Journal for Cultural Research. 24 (1): 1–15. doi:10.1080/14797585.2020.1754642. ISSN 1479-7585. S2CID 219465727.
  10. ^ Bassett, Caroline (2019). "The computational therapeutic: exploring Weizenbaum's ELIZA as a history of the present". AI & Society. 34 (4): 803–812. doi:10.1007/s00146-018-0825-9.
  11. ^ "The Samantha Test". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 2020-07-31. Retrieved 2019-05-25.
  12. ^ Marino, Mark (2006). Chatbot: The Gender and Race Performativity of Conversational Agents. University of California.
  13. ^ Marino, Mark C.; Berry, Dav id M. (2024-11-03). "Reading ELIZA: Critical Code Studies in Action". Electronic Book Review.
  14. ^ Colby, Kenneth Mark; Watt, James B.; Gilbert, John P. (1966). "A Computer Method of Psychotherapy". The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 142 (2): 148–52. doi:10.1097/00005053-196602000-00005. PMID 5936301. S2CID 36947398.
  15. ^ Shah, Huma; Warwick, Kevin; Vallverdú, Jordi; Wu, Defeng (2016). "Can machines talk? Comparison of Eliza with modern dialogue systems" (PDF). Computers in Human Behavior. 58: 278–95. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.01.004.
  16. ^ Shrager, Jeff; Berry, David M.; Hay, Anthony; Millican, Peter (2022). "Finding ELIZA - Rediscovering Weizenbaum's Source Code, Comments and Faksimiles". In Baranovska, Marianna; Höltgen, Stefan (eds.). Hello, I'm Eliza: Fünfzig Jahre Gespräche mit Computern (2nd ed.). Berlin: Projekt Verlag. pp. 247–248.