October 30, 2005

Behind the Scenes of Eliza

Eliza just seems like a frustrating robotic therapist once you get past the "coolness" when you first try her out.
All the same, she is rather impressive. I think there must be certain keywords that she searches for and certain sentence rules and formations.
I think it is hard for Eliza to work one hundred percent properly because she doesnt always have enough context to respond in the best way. She does not seem to have a lot of words that she understands the semantic meaning of. All in all, it's interesting to see, and experience a computer program I can somewhat understand the workings (or lack there of). I'll take Smarterchild in the meantime and get word definitions while I'm at it!

Posted by lcisthur at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

Eliza

In speaking with Eliza, I noticed many things. First of all, whenever I mentioned any form of the word "you", Eliza would always respond with "we were discussing you, not me." There are also other key words and phrases that seem to prompt Eliza with other programmed responses. With more complex sentences, it seems that Eliza will respond with part of your sentence in the form of a question, or she will say "tell me more."

When Eliza came out in the 1960's, I can see how people believed that they were actually talking to a computer. It is hard to imagine though, as I have witnessed that technology is very advanced and always outdoing itself. However, it must have been quite the experience to "talk" to Eliza when the program first came out!

As others have mentioned, there are similar programs today on Instant Messenger, like SmarterChild. I have also discovered one for SantaClaus. I think this is a very interesting concept. Through "talking" with him, you can create a wish list, play games and create a shopping list. I wonder how kids react to "talking" to Santa Claus; it must be quite the experience.

-Jessica F.

Posted by lcisfaria at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

Eliza

Eliza is a far cry from the United Star Ship Enterprise's intelligent computer which, of course, is purely fictional.

Eliza is obviously enacting the very word and sentence structure processes we've been discussing in class. And she shows us how much we take forgranted when it comes to our own storage, retrieval and use of langugage - our average command of language is far more dynamic and advanced than hers.

Eliza has obviously been programmed to break sentences down into components - words and phrases. She then prioritizes these, recognizes certain key words and formulates a response to them. I'm not au fait with my parts of speech and so am unsure which Eliza is recognizing although she obviously recognizes more than one sentence type with different key words and yet is flummoxed by others, showing there is a limit to her knowledge.

Both her ability to recognize and form sentences is limited and rather undynamic. It is reminiscent of the wolves who only had a set number of responses they could give when recognizing certain stimuli. Eliza cannot make truly independent decisions, this is obvious in this version of an intelligent program because her recognition programming and responses are very limited.

She is also rather amusing because her responses are also stereotypically therapist-like, showing concern but in a distanced and controlled fashion.

~ Nanette

Posted by lcissavides at 01:51 PM | Comments (1)

Eliza and Irregular Verbs

Eliza isn't that bad at having a normal conversation. Most of the conversation consisted of me telling her information about myself, and never vice versa. Whenever I would ask her a question she would respond with another question, but other than that she seemed like a normal person to me.

The one thing that gave her away though was her use of irregular verbs. You can tell that she was programmed to repeat what you say by replacing the "I" with "you," and this would normally work. For example, if I were to say "I love snow," she would respond with "you love snow." However, when I used the verb "to be," she responded with "you am from Hanover." Eliza cannot conjugate irregular verbs like we can because that would involve programming each individual form of the verb. It is amazing that our brains are able to do this programming, having the capacity to store so much information.

After talking to Eliza, I talked to SmarterChild to see if he had the same problem with irregular verbs. SmarterChild was able to correctly conjugate the verb "to be" so that he could respond to me with "you are..." Perhaps SmarterChild has all of the irregular verbs programmed into him, or perhaps he just has a few commonly used ones, such as "to be." Either way, his ability to use this verb correctly shows a higher level of linguistic knowledge that has been acheived by computers.

Posted by lcissullivan at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2005

Eliza

I thought alot about how Eliza might work. I think that Eliza works by taking familiar phrases and words from questions and reworking them into statements or questions. In addition, I think that Eliza is programmed to give a certain response to a question. For example, if I said the same thing over and over again, Eliza would give hte same response time after time.

Alot of us talked about Smarter Child and other Instant Messenger Robots, but while doing some research on Eliza I noticed that she is also similar to search engines such as Ask Jeeves. Jeeves is able to pull pertinent/key words out of a question that an individual asks and respond with useful information. For example, I asked, "How tall is an elephant?". Jeeves responded with alot of websites that answered this question, but also included other available "lists" of websites that answered questions about elephants, such as "How much does an elephant weigh?". Also, there were lists of other "similar" questions, such as "How fast does a cheetah run?". Although I am sure that Ask Jeeves runs differently from Eliza, the two are similar in that both are able to choose the key words from a question.

--Brenna D.

Posted by lciscotis at 12:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

Eliza

I found Eliza to be very frustrating to talk to. She never answered any of the questions I asked her and she kept repeating, "are you sure?" and "we were discussing you not me". I think that everytime I typed a sentence with the word "you in it", she would respond with the same thing except she substituted the word "me" for you, or she said, "we were discussing you not me". Eliza was only able to respond to what I typed by taking key words that I had already said and turning those words into a question, I never got a real response from Eliza, I got mostly questions. Another thing I noticed was that whenever I typed the word "no", she would respond with, "you are quite negative", because she "saw" the word no. I was SO frustrated while trying to talk to this program!

Posted by lcismardin at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

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 02:15 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2005

Talking to Eliza

Talking to Eliza was kind of like talking to someone who listens to you, but really doesn't give you much advice on what to do about a situation. I talked to Eliza about stress. When I said that I was kind of stressing out, she asked me why I was stressing out, and I responded by saying that I am a college student. Then she asked me if it is normal to be a college student. I just thought that this was a particularly odd question at the time, when I was really trying to talk about stress.

Basically Eliza is useful when someone needs to get their thoughts out to someone and is not really concerned with receiving accurate advice. I also thought that Eliza was pretty repetitive, because she kept asking if I was even sure about the questions that I was asking her, so it kind of defeated the purpose of actually asking her questions that I would get an answer to. Even though Eliza wasn't really helpful, it was interesting trying to type in a respose so that she could say something interesting back to you.

--Yasmin

Posted by lcisperez at 09:53 PM | Comments (1)

Eliza

Here is a sample of the conversation I had with Eliza:

She was not very fun to talk to and will not talk about herself. Who honestly says "That is quite interesting" to "tell me something nice"??? It is completely irrelevent! And she answers questions with questions, which indicates she does not have any personality like a human being does. Basically her purpose is for people to continue talking about themselves and she throws in the "That's interesting" or "Tell me more". She doens't have intelligence because her remarks do not reveal a personality or a thought process.

Eliza reminds me very much of Smarter Child on AOL Instant Messanger. I assume they are the same type of program. I remember how when I first discovered Smarter Child I was very excited and thought it was pretty cool to talk to a "robot." My sister and I spent a lot of time thinking up weird and obscene things to say to it. Eventually, if I said too many obscenities it would refuse to talk to me unless I apologized. There must have been a certain number of obsecenties or insults written into the program that once surpassed an apology would have to be sad. Smarter Child was very frustrating too because if he/it didn't understand a statement or question you said, he/it would respond with your statement in question form or repeat your question. This demonstrates Smarter Child, like Eliza, is truly dumb though it has the illusion of human qualities.

Posted by lcisfreya at 08:34 AM | Comments (1)

October 23, 2005

Eliza and I

You: how does stock market work Eliza: Does that question interest you? You: yes Eliza: You are sure? You: absolutely Eliza: Please go on. You: Why don't you say anything else? Eliza: Perhaps I will say anything else in good time.

Eliza is an interesting programm. I made the same conversation with several different types of Elizas and they were responding in different ways. It is as if they had different personalities. It is quiete interesting to see that these computers actually generate reasonable responses to what we are typing to them. However, I noticed that their responses get repetetive after a while. It seems to be fun program if you just want to type about random matters. I almost got into a fight with one of the Elizas just for the fun of it (shown above). Have fun everyone,

Posted by lcisbold at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)