What ELIZA taught us about conversation

She asks about you, affirms things you have said, however finding out about her feelings is an elusive task. She is one of the earliest chatbots created by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. Weizenbaum considered ELIZA to demonstrate an example of communication between machine and human, particularly highlighting the lack of depth in this exchange. Surprisingly, even with her short and repetitive utterances, some people attributed to her a level of human understanding. It wasn't that she could read the user's mind, rather, she affirms what the user says through a cascade of regular expression subsitutions used to tweak the user's input. An example is seen below, where ELIZA has picked up on the user's sentence structure and used substitution for her output as seen below.