Natural Language Processing and Cloud Computing in Disease Prevention and Management

Human-Machine Interaction Based On Natural Language

Speech and language are the most natural way of interaction between humans and the idea of having a similar interaction with a machine has been around for many years. The first mention of a chatbot comes in 1950, when English computer scientist Alan Turing (1912-1954), a renowned British mathematician and computer scientist, and was also a pioneer in AI (Levesque 2017), asks the famous question “Can machines think?”. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum, in 1966, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Eliza was the first chatbot to be publicly known. Eliza was able to communicate with humans based on hand-made scripts and accepting only text as input. This chatbot could not be said to understand the conversation, since it was limited to searching for appropriate responses, based on pattern matching, combined with a few of patterns, combined with some clever phrases (Shum, He, and Li 2018). One of ELIZA's applications was DOCTOR, which simulated a person-centered therapy approach in which a psychotherapist talks with a patient and devises responses based on what the patient himself tells him. Briefly, this form of therapy aimed to provide clients with a set of therapeutic conditions in which they can reconnect with their own real, individual experiences and valuation processes, moving away from a reliance on external judgments.