[alicebot-archcomm] Conditional wildcards

[Jonathan Roewen]

 --- Gary Dubuque <gdubuque@attbi.com> wrote: 
> Whoops, that last reply got on the wrong thread.

It was also completely bogus - saying * * is ambiguous
is completely false.
 
> What is the difference between "hello *" and "hello
> * dude"?  This is
> multiple patterns matching ambiguously to the same
> input of "hello surfer
> dude".

No. HELLO * cannot match "Hello surfer dude" if and
only if HELLO * DUDE, or a more exact match exists.

You are confusing ambiguity with exactness.

> Is there a standard that says one or the other has
> precendence?

Yes. It is called the AIML Spec. The only thing I
think it fails to state explicitly is the fact that a
wildcard only consumes as much as is necessary to form
a match. This is implied by the design of the
graphmaster.
>
> But the point here is that the discussion of
> conditional wildcards is not a
> discussion of ambiguity.

Not true.

> It is a finer, more
> precise specification for an
> already ambiguous feature.  It is for a specific
> purpose of extract
> meaningful units that don't fit the in the same
> packaging as words.  Yet
> there are qualities of these units that can be
> identified enough to process
> them as logical entities.  It is clear that a date
> is a date even though it
> is expressed in a varying format.  To extrapolate
> the requirement to some
> generalized "sets" of patterns may be premature. 
> The focus is on known
> qualtities.  I don't want to dive into the deep
> waters of semantic meanings
> yet.  I want to stay at the level of word
> recognition when I propose this
> enhancement.

You can't stay at this level if you want to propose
this idea! You can't have it both ways.

And conditional wildcards does produce ambiguity where
there previously was none before.

The only part that is ambiguous is the AIML writer's
understanding.

Jon =)



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