Chatbots' Greetings to Human-Computer Communication

Both dialogue systems and chatbots aim at putting into action communication between humans and computers. However, instead of focusing on sophisticated techniques to perform natural language understanding, as the former usually do, chatbots seek to mimic conversation. Since Eliza, the first chatbot ever, developed in 1966, there were many interesting ideas explored by the chatbots' community. Actually, more than just ideas, some chatbots' developers also provide free resources, including tools and large-scale corpora. It is our opinion that this know-how and materials should not be neglected, as they might be put to use in the human-computer communication field (and some authors already do it). Thus, in this paper we present a historical overview of the chatbots' developments, we review what we consider to be the main contributions of this community, and we point to some possible ways of coupling these with current work in the human-computer communication research line.

[1]  Elisabeth André,et al.  Planning Small Talk behavior with cultural influences for multiagent systems , 2011, Comput. Speech Lang..

[2]  Asbjørn Følstad,et al.  Chatbots and the new world of HCI , 2017, Interactions.

[3]  Robert Dale,et al.  The return of the chatbots , 2016, Natural Language Engineering.

[4]  Haizhou Li,et al.  IRIS: a Chat-oriented Dialogue System based on the Vector Space Model , 2012, ACL.

[5]  John D. Lafferty,et al.  A Robust Parsing Algorithm for Link Grammars , 1995, IWPT.

[6]  Alvin K. Cho.  Emotional and Domain Concept Enhancements to Alicebot , 2007 .

[7]  Bhawani Shankar Chowdhry,et al.  MedChatBot: An UMLS based Chatbot for Medical Students , 2012 .

[8]  Jonathan Freeman,et al.  Computing Machinery and the Individual: the Personal Turing Test , 2005 .

[9]  Martin Llamas,et al.  CHARLIE: An AIML-based chatterbot which works as an interface among INES and humans , 2009, 2009 EAEEIE Annual Conference.

[10]  Robert Epstein,et al.  The Quest for the Thinking Computer , 1992, AI Mag..

[11]  Scott E. Fahlman.  Using Scone's Multiple-Context Mechanism to Emulate Human-Like Reasoning , 2011, AAAI Fall Symposium: Advances in Cognitive Systems.

[12]  Suzanne Stevens,et al.  To Russia with love. , 1997, CDS review.

[13]  Quoc V. Le,et al.  A Neural Conversational Model , 2015, ArXiv.

[14]  Bayan Abu Shawar,et al.  Using dialogue corpora to train a chatbot , 2003 .

[15]  Niels Ole Bernsen,et al.  Meet Hans Christian Andersen , 2005, SIGDIAL Workshop.

[16]  David R. Traum,et al.  What would you Ask a conversational Agent? Observations of Human-Agent Dialogues in a Museum Setting , 2008, LREC.

[17]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  On our best behaviour , 2014, Artif. Intell..

[18]  Y. Wilks,et al.  CONVERSE: a Conversational Companion , 1999 .

[19]  Jianfeng Gao,et al.  A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models , 2015, NAACL.

[20]  Anton Leuski,et al.  All Together Now - Introducing the Virtual Human Toolkit , 2013, IVA.

[21]  Bob Heller,et al.  Freudbot: An Investigation of Chatbot Technology in Distance Education , 2005 .

[22]  Flávia de Almeida Barros,et al.  Persona-AIML: an architecture for developing chatterbots with personality , 2004, Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2004. AAMAS 2004..

[23]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[24]  Michael Kipp,et al.  Visual SceneMaker—a tool for authoring interactive virtual characters , 2012, Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces.

[25]  Paco Xander Nathan,et al.  FRED, Milton and Barry: the evolution of intelligent agents for the Web , 1997 .

[26]  Anton Leuski,et al.  Dealing with Out of Domain Questions in Virtual Characters , 2006, IVA.

[27]  Luísa Coheur,et al.  Luke, I am Your Father: Dealing with Out-of-Domain Requests by Using Movies Subtitles , 2014, IVA.

[28]  Kenneth Mark Colby,et al.  Ten criticisms of parry , 1974, SGAR.

[29]  Michael L. Mauldin,et al.  CHATTERBOTS, TINYMUDS, and the Turing Test: Entering the Loebner Prize Competition , 1994, AAAI.

[30]  Justine Cassell,et al.  Small Talk and Conversational Storytelling In Embodied Conversational Interface Agents , 1999 .

[31]  Huma Shah.  A.L.I.C.E.: an ACE in Digitaland , 2006 .

[32]  Rafael E. Banchs.  Movie-DiC: a Movie Dialogue Corpus for Research and Development , 2012, ACL.

[33]  Ying Liu,et al.  An evaluation of the chat and knowledge delivery components of a low-level dialog system: The AZ-ALICE experiment , 2007, Decis. Support Syst..

[34]  A. M. Turing,et al.  Computing Machinery and Intelligence , 1950, The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.

[35]  Antonella De Angeli,et al.  I hate you! Disinhibition with virtual partners , 2008, Interact. Comput..

[36]  Eric Atwell,et al.  A corpus-based approach to generalising a chatbot system , 2003, Proces. del Leng. Natural.

[37]  Varol Akman,et al.  Turing Test: 50 Years Later , 2000, Minds and Machines.

[38]  Benjamin Kuipers,et al.  Computer power and human reason , 1976, SGAR.

[39]  Luísa Coheur,et al.  Using subtitles to deal with Out-of-Domain interactions , 2014 .

[40]  Joseph Weizenbaum,et al.  ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine , 1966, CACM.

[41]  Luísa Coheur,et al.  Meet EDGAR, a tutoring agent at MONSERRATE , 2013, ACL.

[42]  David M. W. Powers,et al.  The Total Turing Test and the Loebner Prize , 1998, CoNLL.

[43]  Jason Hutchens,et al.  How to Pass the Turing Test by Cheating , 1997 .

[44]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  The Winograd Schema Challenge , 2011, AAAI Spring Symposium: Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning.

[45]  Justine Cassell,et al.  "How about this weather?" Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents , 2000 .

[46]  Anton Leuski,et al.  Ada and Grace: Direct Interaction with Museum Visitors , 2012, IVA.