Dehumanized people and humanized programs: a natural language view of being there
Dan Fass · ACM SIGART Bulletin · 1990
The language used by Chance the gardener, the main character in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, is uncannily like that of several well known natural language understanding systems: ELIZA, PARRY and SAM. This natural language understanding (NLU) view of Chance meshes remarkably well with literary criticism of the character and the book. In light of these resemblances, there is some (not-too-serious) discussion of how NLU systems might perform more intelligently, or at least might appear more intelligent.