Intro to Chatbots
Emily Chao(elchao2), Berwin Xie(bxie6)
What are Chatbots?
- Used to emulate humans
- People interact with them to accomplish different tasks
- A lot more natural than menu systems
Example uses
- Personal Assistant (i.e. Siri, Google Assistant, etc)
- Customer Service (Helping people troubleshoot)
- Conversation Bots
How they work
- Ability to detect user input (text or voice)
- Process the input into 'tokens' to extract topics
- Construct a response based on information
Tutorial!
- Let's take a look at a seminal bot: ELIZA
- ELIZA was one of the first bots to be used as a psychotherapist
- Although it is very limiting, it provides a good overview of how early bots worked
ELIZA
- ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.
- ELIZA simulated conversation by using a 'pattern matching' and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program
- The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs.
- ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots, but was also regarded as one of the first programs capable of passing the Turing Test.