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 is similar to
Joseph Weizenbaum's classical
ELIZA program. 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 current version, "Program D", is written in Java (a C++ version also exists) and uses an XML DTD called AIML? (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristical 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 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.
External links: