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Background
Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA converses with the user through
text, and simulates the behavior of a Rogerian psychologist.
Here is part of an exchange:
Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY?
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
ELIZA accomplishes this feat of conversational coherence through
the use of a very simple set of tricks for mapping the user's input
to an appropriate response. Rather than building a complex natural
language parser, Eliza uses scripted rules for choosing responses
to user input.
ELIZA's script, for example, might have a rule that specifies that
if the user says "<something> are all <something>"
then the response should be "In what way?" ELIZA might
also respond to certain keywords with other preset responses. ELIZA,
for example, might be programmed to respond to any sentence with
the word "always" in it with "Can you think of a
specific example?" Also, ELIZA can reassemble bits of text
from the user's sentence and recycle them in its responses. For
more detailed information on the architecture of ELIZA, consult
Weizenbaum's original
paper.
Character Maker is a tool for allowing anyone to author ELIZA like
characters through a graphical user interface. The organization
of Character Maker characters diverges and expands upon ELIZA's
architecture. For example, Character Maker characters can track
the conversational context through a topic system.
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