A.L.I.C.E.

A.L.I.C.E. 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. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program but takes a quite different approach. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and won the Loebner Prize two times in a row (2000 and 2001). However, the program is unable to pass for a human for more than a few minutes; even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.

The abbreviation A.L.I.C.E. stands for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity; it was chosen because the computer that ran the first version of the software was called Alice.

Development began in 1995. The program was rewritten in Java beginning in 1998, resulting in the current version "Program D." (A C++ version also exists.) The program uses an XML DTD called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristical conversation rules. It is released under the copyleft license GPL.

The A.L.I.C.E. open source project includes over 300 contributors from around the world. The main contributor and original author is Richard Wallace, a computer science Ph.D. who lost his academic positions because of his manic depression.

In November 2002, two instances of the bot were set to talk to each other, with results showing A.L.I.C.E.'s weaknesses.

External links

• The conversation of A.L.I.C.E. to A.L.I.C.E.: http://www.nik.com.au/alice/
• The homepage of the project: http://www.alicebot.org
• AIML specification: http://www.alicebot.org/TR/2001/WD-aiml/
• Clive Thompson: Approximating Life, The New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002