Birgit Juen

Who is Eliza? Computer program developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum (* 8. Jannuary 1923, † 5. March 2008). Very early example of natural language processing. One of the first chatterbots in existence. Named after Eliza Doolittle, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s Play Pygmalion.

Who is Eliza? The program can simulate a human-like interaction. Its mission was the attempt to replicate the conversation between a psychoanalyst and a patient. In a therapeutic situation a human being can reply to a statement with a question, that indicates very little specific knowledge of the topic.

Basically ELIZA works by turning everything you say around: How does it work? Basically ELIZA works by turning everything you say around: Input text is read and inspected for keywords, sentence is transformed according to a rule associated with the keyword, if no keyword is found, a content-free remark is retrieved. More complex: Keywords may have a rank; identification of the most important keyword. Identification of some minimal context within which the chosen keyword appears. Choice of an appropriate transformation rule + making of the transformation. Respond “intelligently” even if no keyword is detected in the input text.

Demo Various versions available for download or to use online i.E. http://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/eliza.html

What Siri says about Eliza

Reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA J. “ELIZA – A Computer Program For the Study of Communication Between Man And Machine”. In Communications of the ACM Volume 9, Number 1 (January 1966), pp. 36-45. http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=365168&ftid=64039&dwn=1&CFID=383890646&CFTOKEN=12646427 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA