ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. 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. Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally) 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. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school, 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 and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test.
A chatbot is a software application or web interface that is designed to mimic human conversation through text or voice interactions. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of maintaining a conversation with a user in natural language and simulating the way a human would behave as a conversational partner. Such chatbots often use deep learning and natural language processing, but simpler chatbots have existed for decades.
The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously held textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge would attempt to determine which was which.
Hugh Loebner was an American inventor and social activist, who was notable for sponsoring the Loebner Prize, an embodiment of the Turing test. Loebner held six United States Patents, and was also an outspoken advocate for the decriminalization of prostitution.
Jabberwacky is a chatterbot created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter. Its stated aim is to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner". It is an early attempt at creating an artificial intelligence through human interaction.
Albert One is an artificial intelligence chatbot created by Robby Garner and designed to mimic the way humans make conversations using a multi-faceted approach in natural language programming.
A.L.I.C.E., also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program.
The minimum intelligent signal test, or MIST, is a variation of the Turing test proposed by Chris McKinstry in which only boolean answers may be given to questions. The purpose of such a test is to provide a quantitative statistical measure of humanness, which may subsequently be used to optimize the performance of artificial intelligence systems intended to imitate human responses.
MegaHAL is a computer conversation simulator, or "chatterbot", created by Jason Hutchens.
The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) was a popular chatbot program and artificial intelligence software development kit (SDK) for Windows and web.
Paco Nathan is an American computer scientist and early engineer of the World Wide Web. Nathan is also an author and performance art show producer who established much of his career in Austin, Texas.
Fred, or FRED, was an early chatbot written by Robby Garner.
Kenneth Mark Colby was an American psychiatrist dedicated to the theory and application of computer science and artificial intelligence to psychiatry. Colby was a pioneer in the development of computer technology as a tool to try to understand cognitive functions and to assist both patients and doctors in the treatment process. He is perhaps best known for the development of a computer program called PARRY, which mimicked a person with paranoid schizophrenia and could "converse" with others. PARRY sparked serious debate about the possibility and nature of machine intelligence.
The computer game bot Turing test is a variant of the Turing test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world must distinguish between other humans and video game bots, both interacting with the same virtual world. This variant was first proposed in 2008 by Associate Professor Philip Hingston of Edith Cowan University, and implemented through a tournament called the 2K BotPrize.
The confederate effect is the phenomenon of people falsely classifying human intelligence as machine intelligence during Turing tests. For example, in the Loebner Prize during which a tester conducts a text exchange with one human and one artificial-intelligence chatbot and is tasked to identify which is which, the confederate effect describes the tester inaccurately identifying the human as the machine.
Eugene Goostman is a chatbot that some regard as having passed the Turing test, a test of a computer's ability to communicate indistinguishably from a human. Developed in Saint Petersburg in 2001 by a group of three programmers, the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—characteristics that are intended to induce forgiveness in those with whom it interacts for its grammatical errors and lack of general knowledge.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).
Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application. It was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter and launched in October 2008. It was preceded by Jabberwacky, a chatbot project that began in 1988 and went online in 1997. In its first decade, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since launching on the web, the number of conversations held has exceeded 150 million. Besides the web application, Cleverbot is also available as an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:
