A program which can be taught to respond to sentences typed by a user in a way that can give the illusion of understanding them, but which in fact relies on pattern matching and substitution to produce answers based on a pre determined set of stock phrases. ELIZA was originally developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s, and now serves as a demonstration of the technique and as a warning against taking the responses of a computer at face value.
An early experimental computer program in AI that carried on a dialogue with a person. The computer appeared to understand what was being said but in fact was just filling blanks in formulaic conversation.
ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to "My head hurts" might be "Why do you say your head hurts?" The response to "My mother hates me" might be "Who else in your family hates you?"