[alicebot-archcomm] Conditional wildcards

[Dr. Rich Wallace]

The minimalist camp gets up and screams, over our dead bodies!

Seriously, one school of thought here is that eventually we want to make
AIML compatible with speech input tokens, the real holy grail, and in
speech we really don't differentiate between words, numbers, and other
symbols.

The substituter mechanism in AIML takes care of a lot of this with
replacements such as "DRWALLACE AT ALICEBOT DOT ORG" and "TEN DOLLARS AND
TWENTY FIVE CENTS" for inputs like "drwallace@alicebot.org" and "$10.25".

The experimentalist camp is probably fed up.


> I know the discussion of using things like regular expressions has been
> tried already.  The problem it solves is a necessary one.
>
> What about wildcards that match in the pattern and then perform a second
> level of analysis before the whole graphmaster process is completed?
> Say a wildcard that has the conditional of a date is in a pattern.
> While matching the pattern, the date is assumed as a special wildcard
> match that saves the position in the input and the conditional part of
> the wildcard and the input consumed by the wildcard.  If the whole
> pattern is matched, then the conditional is applied to the consumed
> input.  A success completes the processing as normal.  A failure resumes
> the graphmaster as if the pattern failed in the first place at the spot
> where the conditional wildcard was saved.
>
> This gives the same speed of the regular graphmaster, but also allows
> the dates, currency, phone numbers, urls, etc. to be properly placed in
> wildcards.
>
> I have no format for conditional wildcards except that they should start
> like regular wildcards...  Maybe something like "*{##/##/##}".
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Rich
W A L L A C E
ALICE A.I. Foundation
drwallace@www.alicebot.org