CONVERSE: a Conversational Companion

Abstract

Empirical and theoretical investigations of the nature and structure of human dialogue have been a topic of research in artificial intelligence and the more human areas of linguistics for decades: there has been much interesting work but no definitive or uncontroversial findings. the best performance overall has probably been Colby’s PARRY (Colby,1973) since its release on the (then ARPA) net around 1973. It was robust, never broke down, always had something to say and, because it was intended to model paranoid behaviour, its zanier misunderstandings could always be taken as further evidence of mental disturbance rather than the processing failures they were.