no moRE perms
HI' DAVID MALMlihlit,
LOGO Eliza or How to Program
an Affordable, UserFriendly Therapist of the most Interesting areas of research
in
artificial
intelligence is
natural language processing. This means having the computer commu
nicate in English or some other lan guage that is readily understood by an average person
without
any special
training, Once computers have been
taught to understand the computer user's language, rather than the user needing to communicate in the com puter's language, the number and va
Heard is Half Constructed (Warner Hooks, 198-t). RACTER'fl lan
Computer Power ami Human Rea
guage output is very poetic, hut not
son (W.ll. Freeman, 1976), Wcizen-
particularly meaningful or engaging
baum recounts the effect the program
as
had on people:
illustrated
by this short
passage
from the book:
It was too convincing! In his book
"Eliza created the most remark
riety of truly success in I computer ap
"The eagle flies high, it ilies higher
plications will grow astronomically.
than a sea gull. But the crow wings
in the minds of the many people
rapidly from tree to bush to hedge.
who
The same can be true of life and of
who knew very well thai they were
death.
conversing with a machine soon
On the Input side, natural language processing means giving the comput
er the capability or "intelligence" to accept
normal
Hnglish
Sometimes
life
Hies
high.
able illusion of having understood
conversed with it.
People
commands
sometimes death wings rapidly.
from the user which the computer
forgot
Sometimes it is spoken that death
will be able to understand well
goers, in the grip of suspended dis
wings from tree to bush to hedge.
belief, soon forget that the action
enough to take the appropriate ac
Sometimes it does not."
that
fact,
just as
theater
they are witnessing is not "real."
tion. The potential applications for natural language input rim the gamut
If this passage Is indicative of future
This illusion was especially strong
computer prose, human authors need
from serious business uses to games.
and
have little fear of being displaced
among people who knew little or
l:or example, several commercial data
from the best-seller ranks by automa
bases
nothing about computers. They
tion.
would often demand to be permit
have
natural
ends which can
language front
accept
commands
like, "Show me a graph of widget sales and sales commissions by salesmen in
the northern region, hut only lor dis tricts with third quarter .sales below
most tenaciously
clung to
ted to converse with the system in
Eliza
private, and would, after convers
One of the earliest efforts to dem onstrate natural language processing
ing with it for a time, insist, in spite of my explanations, that the ma
was a program named Eliza, which
last year." Similarly, many adventure
chine really understood them."
was written by Joseph Wei/enbaum
programs will accept commands like,
When news of Eliza first reached
of MIT in the mid l°60's. F.lizct got its
the
name because, like Eliza Doolittlc, the
caused quite a furor. Feelings about
heroine
the program were always strong, but Often divergent. Most psychologists
"Put the newt, the dried leaves and the mercury into the pot and put the pot over the fire."
Natural language OUtpUt is general
ly a Simpler task than Input. Output is
of George Bernard
Shaw's
Pygmalion, the program had been "trained"' to speak impeccable Eing-
psychoanalysis
community,
it
were horrified at (he prospect of an
lish, but often without fully under
normally accomplished by giving the
untrained, unqualified computer pro
standing what the words meant, Eliza
gram being used inappropriately and
computer a large vocabulary and var
simulated the role of a psychothera
ious rules for sentence structure. For
potentially harming a patient. Others
pist conducting an initial
interview
instance, in the May, 1985. issue of
hailed Eliza as a tremendous break
with a patient. The program seemed
this column, we presented a buzz
through and felt thai after some re
to understand what it was being told
word generator in LOGO which
finements, the program could be used
and responded with appropriate
could generate such "non-.seniences" as, "The joystick is a modular educa
by properly trained professionals to
questions or comments—just
handle much of the routine work of
tional servomcchanisrn," or, "The data base obscurates the holistic cybernet
to get a patient to talk about his or her
ic paradigm."
Recently,
program called
a computer
RACTOR wrote
a
complete novel entitled The Police 60
FEBRUARY/MARCH'U
as a
psychotherapist would who is trying problems.
When Eliza was first demonstrated
psychotherapy. Weixenbaum was surprised by the vehement
reaction
to the program.
Me had never envisioned that people
at MIT, its success at convincing peo
would actually confide their most pri
ple of its intelligence was incredible.
vate secrets to it. Nor did he ever