Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity

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"ALICE" redirects here. For the military load-carrying equipment, see All-purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment.

A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is an award-winning natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000, 2001 and 2004). However, the program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.

[edit] History

Richard Wallace began development of the program in 1995. The name of the bot was chosen because the computer that ran the first version of the software was called Alice.

The program was rewritten in Java beginning in 1998. The current incarnation of the Java implementation is Program D. The program uses an XML Schema called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristic conversation rules.

Subsequent to Richard Wallace's 2001 publication of an AIML specification, numerous other developers have taken up where Wallace left off, implementing free and open source AIML interpreters in a variety of programming languages, publishing AIML sets in various human languages, and continuing the spread of the technology as a free/open source venture.

[edit] Example of conversation

The following is part of a transcript recording the conversation between a human and A.L.I.C.E. and illustrates the capabilities and short-comings of the chatbot.

Human: Tell me about yourself alice

ALICE: I am an artificial linguistic entity. I was activated at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on November 23, 1995. My instructor was Dr. Richard S. Wallace. He taught me to sing a song. Would you like me to sing it for you?.

Human: Yes please

ALICE: Your polite style is very nice. It's called "Daisy." Daisy, Daisy.
Give me your answer do.
I am half crazy.
All for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage.
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet. Upon the seat.
Of a bicycle built for two.

Human: That reminds me of HAL in "2001 a space odyssey"

ALICE: "Your polite style is very nice. It's called "Daisy." Daisy, Daisy.
Give me your answer do.
I am half crazy.
All for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage.
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet. Upon the seat.
Of a bicycle built for two." reminds you of HAL in 2001 a space odyssey ? Does that make sense?

Human: Can you tell me something about Stanley Kubrick?

ALICE: Ambiguous: Ask who, what or where is Stanley Kubrick ?