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ELIZA
The quest for a program that can imitate a human dates from the earliest days of computing. One of
the earliest “chatbot” programs was written by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1964. The program was called
ELIZA and was designed to create the impression that the user was having a conversation with a psychother-
apist. Weizenbaum named the program ELIZA after Eliza Doolitle, a working-class character who learns to
speak with an upper-class accent in George Bernard Shaw's play
Pygmalion
. ELIZA uses an open-ended style
of questioning similar to the client-centered psychotherapy introduced by psychologist Carl Rogers in the
1940s. This style of therapy aims to increase a patient's understanding and insight by asking questions about
the person's thoughts and feelings and by rephrasing the responses. ELIZA has no understanding of the
meaning of the conversation, but the program does “pattern matching” and follows some simple rules for
formulating questions. The style of conversation that results can be seen from the following example script
from an ELIZA session:
Person:
Men are all alike.
ELIZA:
In what way?
Person:
They're always bugging us about something or other.
ELIZA:
Can you think of a specific example?
Person:
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
ELIZA:
Your boyfriend made you come here?
Person:
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
ELIZA:
I am sorry to hear that you are depressed.
Person:
It's true. I am unhappy.
ELIZA:
Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
Person:
I need some help, that much seems certain.
ELIZA:
What would it mean to you if you got some help?
Person:
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
ELIZA:
Tell me more about your family.
Weizenbaum has said that ELIZA provided a parody of the responses of a nondirectional psychotherapist
in an initial psychiatric interview. He also said that he chose the context of psychotherapy to “sidestep the
problem of giving the program a data-base of real-world knowledge”
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because the therapeutic situation
is one of the few human situations in which a human being can reply to a statement with a question that
indicates very little specific knowledge of the topic under discussion. The dialog could sometimes be so con-
vincing that some users thought they were dealing with a human therapist instead of a machine, and there
are many anecdotes about people becoming emotionally engaged with the ELIZA program.
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