Chatbots' Greetings to Human-Computer Communication

TL;DR

This paper reviews the history and contributions of chatbots, emphasizing their role in mimicking conversation and highlighting resources that can enhance human-computer communication research.

Contribution

It provides a historical overview of chatbots, reviews key community contributions, and suggests integrating existing resources with current communication research.

Findings

Chatbots have evolved from Eliza to modern systems.

Resources like tools and corpora are valuable for research.

Chatbots' community offers insights for future human-computer communication studies.

Abstract

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.