ELIZA
Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 MIT program that mimicked therapy dialogue via keyword rules, famous for the ELIZA effect.
ELIZA was a 1966 program by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT: a rule- and keyword-based chatbot script (not a learned model) that could sound empathic in a narrow “therapist” setting. It belongs to symbolic AI and pattern-matching NLP, not neural networks or LLMs.
Users often over-attributed understanding to ELIZA (ELIZA effect), foreshadowing debates around the Turing test and whether fluent dialogue implies real comprehension.