Showing posts with label Joseph Weizenbaum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Weizenbaum. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - What Is The ELIZA Software?

 



ELIZA is a conversational computer software created by German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1964 and 1966.


Weizenbaum worked on ELIZA as part of a groundbreaking artificial intelligence research team on the DARPA-funded Project MAC, which was directed by Marvin Minsky (Mathematics and Computation).

Weizenbaum called ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle, a fictitious character in the play Pygmalion who learns correct English; that play had recently been made into the successful film My Fair Lady in 1964.


ELIZA was created with the goal of allowing a person to communicate with a computer system in plain English.


Weizenbaum became an AI skeptic as a result of ELIZA's popularity among users.

When communicating with ELIZA, users may input any statement into the system's open-ended interface.

ELIZA will often answer by asking a question, much like a Rogerian psychologist attempting to delve deeper into the patient's core ideas.

The application recycles portions of the user's comments while the user continues their chat with ELIZA, providing the impression that ELIZA is genuinely listening.


Weizenbaum had really developed ELIZA to have a tree-like decision structure.


The user's statements are first filtered for important terms.

The terms are ordered in order of significance if more than one keyword is discovered.

For example, if a user writes in "I suppose everyone laughs at me," the term "everybody," not "I," is the most crucial for ELIZA to reply to.

In order to generate a response, the computer uses a collection of algorithms to create a suitable sentence structure around those key phrases.

Alternatively, if the user's input phrase does not include any words found in ELIZA's database, the software finds a content-free comment or repeats a previous answer.


ELIZA was created by Weizenbaum to investigate the meaning of machine intelligence.


Weizenbaum derived his inspiration from a comment made by MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, according to a 1962 article in Datamation.

"Intelligence was just a characteristic human observers were willing to assign to processes they didn't comprehend, and only for as long as they didn't understand them," Minsky had claimed (Weizenbaum 1962).

If such was the case, Weizenbaum concluded, artificial intelligence's main goal was to "fool certain onlookers for a while" (Weizenbaum 1962).


ELIZA was created to accomplish precisely that by giving users reasonable answers while concealing how little the software genuinely understands in order to keep the user's faith in its intelligence alive for a bit longer.


Weizenbaum was taken aback by how successful ELIZA became.

ELIZA's Rogerian script became popular as a program renamed DOCTOR at MIT and distributed to other university campuses by the late 1960s—where the program was constructed from Weizenbaum's 1965 description published in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

The application deceived (too) many users, even those who were well-versed in its methods.


Most notably, some users grew so engrossed with ELIZA that they demanded that others leave the room so they could have a private session with "the" DOCTOR.


But it was the psychiatric community's reaction that made Weizenbaum very dubious of current artificial intelligence ambitions in general, and promises of computer comprehension of natural language in particular.

Kenneth Colby, a Stanford University psychiatrist with whom Weizenbaum had previously cooperated, created PARRY about the same time that Weizenbaum released ELIZA.


Colby, unlike Weizenbaum, thought that programs like PARRY and ELIZA were beneficial to psychology and public health.


They aided the development of diagnostic tools, enabling one psychiatric computer to treat hundreds of patients, according to him.

Weizenbaum's worries and emotional plea to the community of computer scientists were eventually conveyed in his book Computer Power and Human Reason (1976).

Weizenbaum railed against individuals who neglected the presence of basic distinctions between man and machine in this — at the time — hotly discussed book, arguing that "there are some things that computers ought not to execute, regardless of whether computers can be persuaded to do them" (Weizenbaum 1976, x).


Jai Krishna Ponnappan


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Chatbots and Loebner Prize; Expert Systems; Minsky, Marvin; Natural Lan￾guage Processing and Speech Understanding; PARRY; Turing Test


Further Reading:


McCorduck, Pamela. 1979. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 251–56, 308–28. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1962. “How to Make a Computer Appear Intelligent: Five in a Row Offers No Guarantees.” Datamation 8 (February): 24–26.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1966. “ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine.” Communications of the ACM 1 (January): 36–45.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company



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