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October 25, 2005
ELIZA's Purpose and Function
Eliza is a complex program that somehow looks at strings (words) and identifies them in terms of where they are placed in a sentence, the amount of strings that come before and after that particular string and possibly punctuation marks as well. Eliza, from what the programmer writes, seems to break sentences up through the importance of words. Maybe Eliza has a specific set of words that it refers to, that people most commonly use and are of some importance. Maybe each common word actually corresponds to a certain number that the computer can recognize. Eliza also breaks these sentences down into structural word trees and analyzes the sentences based on their subjects. It seems as though the Eliza has a special way that allows her to find subjects like "you" or "I" and make these subjects the focus of her next question. She also gives part of the sentence a number or letter, indicating that this part of the sentence could be anything, any combination of letters and words. In general, Eliza is definitely sentence structured oriented and dissecting the sentences inputed is the only way she can truly function. Then Eliza takes these words or takes these number combinations (from sentences) and stores them, so that she can then generate a new response. I can imagine this process and code for this program is extremely in depth. In being an amateur programmer, I can understand that working with words and strings are incredibly difficult.
-Christina
Posted by lcisgancarz at October 25, 2005 02:15 PM