Is There Progress on Talking Sensibly to Machines?

摘要

Since the earliest days of computing, people have sought ways to communicate with computers in "natural" language, rather than program them in symbolic languages like FORTRAN and C. In the 1960s, MIT researcher Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program was an entertaining simulation of a Rogerian therapist (1). ELIZA took words you had used and played them back, as in: "Tell me why you feel like that about your family?" It is an irony of the brief history of machine dialog programs that ELIZA is remembered and PARRY is not. PARRY ran on the early ARPAnet at Stanford in the late 1960s and was designed by Kenneth Colby, a psychiatrist who wanted to model paranoiacs and their beliefs (2). PARRY was paranoid about the Mafia, horse races, track betting, and Italian-Americans; if anything you typed could be linked to them, it would spew out a paragraph of invective.