Chatbots' Greetings to Human-Computer Communication

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.