[alicebot-archcomm] Matching Order Revised

[Sandro Golinelli]

i tried to sum up the two replies of Kim and Jeroen...

J. said:
>
> I think the most confusing thing about <topic/> is its
> name. As for <that/>, I think it serves its purpose
> very well in the current ordering of topics. And don't
> forget about the underscore ;-)
>

I still think the current order is ok and the <topic/> is somewhat
confusing, whenever i'm almost ok with <that/>.
(Can you name a bot that uses <topic/> and that is not one from Dirk? Even
Alice does not use <topic/> ;-))

But i'm also thinking about context and i could see it using a <topic/> that
mean topic and a <that/> that mean the bot last reply, these two are used to
keep the context (or move away from the current topic) of the conversation.

J. said:
>
> If it's ordered by topic and that, then the user input
> will never be the most important piece of the
> conversation, as a catchall in a topic is more
> important than an exact match outside of the topic.
>

With this matching order i think that a catchall in a topic could be a
pre-process action, or it can mange the behaviour of switching between
topics or do something other like fall in the * <topic/>.

J. said:
>
> In theory it's not. Only in practice as there are less
> categories that use non-default <that/> (*) than there
> are for <pattern/>. And similarly for <topic/>.
>

I just approximated it fairly by just visually comparing the two matching
orders.


K. said:

>
> The basic premise in AIML is that the more you know about the user input,
> the bettern a certain response is - disregarding all other contexts.

isn't it too strict ? ;)

K. said:

> This allows you to stay flexible - when talking about the weather and
> somebody suddenly yells "WATCH OUT!" you probably won't continue to talk
> about the weather.
>

in this revised matching order topics are like chambers. For example in each
topic the catchall is used to manage the topic change behaviour, so i can
think of sentences like "let's talk about something else" or "What do you
know about foobar" in the * <topic/> are the keys to leave and join any
room.
Indeed, i think in this way it is possible to divide specific topics in
compartments and leave all the basic patterns in the general one.
Like if in a boring chat we are talking about nothing and you say: how is
the weather?
in this way you are able to catch on specific keywords that uses _ and move
on in a spicific topic to gather the reply. moreover you can continue the
chat about that topic or jump in another topic using the catchall in that
topic.

as a last disclaimer: i haven't tried it practically but you are free to do
it ;-)

I have completed with _ the pattern matching order.
The 1st page is the official one, the second page is the messy revised one,
and the third page is the pattern matching ordered by topic - that - pattern

The RTF file still be available here:
http://geocities.com/pons18/Download/matching-order.rtf