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Harald Sack

With the advent of ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum's first psychotherapist chatbot, NLP took another major step with pattern-based substitution algorithms based on simple regular expressions.

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1966). ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Com. of the ACM. 9: 36–45.

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365

@fizise @fiz_karlsruhe @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique

@lysander07

My lecturers in compuational linguistics talked about #ELIZA in a different way. According to them, Weizenbaum's intention was to demonstrate how easily people can be tricked into believing that they are communicating with a sentient being.

To do so, he used a peculiarity of Rogerian psychotherapy: The therapist tends to mirror what the patient said.

So Weizenbaum's achievement with ELIZA was not a breakthrough in NLP but a warning to us.

It's timely to remember his warning as we see lots of people making false assumptions about imagined cognitive abilities of #LLM-driven chatbots just because they produce fluent text.

@fizise @fiz_karlsruhe @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique

@chpietsch @fizise @fiz_karlsruhe @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique

As you might read the longer text included in the slides, I don't disagree with you ;-) .And yes, the fatal effect that people are easily tricked to overestimate the machine's "intellectual" capacities is exactly what I am talking about to the students pointing towards today's popular LLM-based chatbots...

However, ELIZA was a first simple chatbot and thereby a milestone in rule-based NLP of that time (i.e. the 1960s)

@lysander07 Sometimes I forget that other people's toots are limited to 500 characters. Apologies!

@lysander07

Eliza war aber kein Therapie-ChatBot, sondern ein ChatBot, der eine einzelne Schule der Therapie persiflierte und mit dem Weizenbaum auf Technologiegläubigkeit hinweisen und davor warnen wollte. Er war entsetzt, dass Menschen diesen simplen Pattern-Matcher wie einen menschlichen Therapeuten behandelten.

@Weizenbaum_Institut

@fizise @fiz_karlsruhe @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique