Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Thanks, everybody. The buzz at Hacker News is that the Clojure community is awesome, and the buzz is right. Now, to me, it follows from the advice you gave that I should do two projects: 1. Learn Clojure by implementing (some of) AIML (about half of the language is of no interest to me) 2. Implement what I prototyped in AIML (context, objects, processes) in Clojure Does this sound right? Dirk Luke VanderHart schrieb: On May 6, 4:39 am, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: I realize now that there is no quick fix, and I'll have to learn a lot to do this properly. But are there already enough resources so that I can learn how to do it in Clojure? For example, would there be enough about string processing in Programming Clojure to learn it from theere? Clojure itself is very well documented for a language that's been out for less than two years, and as you can see, there is an active community to turn to for help. With persistence, it's very possible to become a Clojure expert in a short amount of time. I don't imagine you'll have any problem with the language itself. You'll probably have to get some books or look elsewhere for help with the actual algorithms specific to this problem domain, though - I doubt there's any Clojure tutorials dedicated specifically to pattern matching or AI. But anything that can be implemented in another language can be implemented (probably better) in Clojure, so if you know Clojure and you can at least read the examples in the AI literature, you should be good to go. -Luke --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
2009/5/7 dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com: Thanks, everybody. The buzz at Hacker News is that the Clojure community is awesome, and the buzz is right. Now, to me, it follows from the advice you gave that I should do two projects: 1. Learn Clojure by implementing (some of) AIML (about half of the language is of no interest to me) 2. Implement what I prototyped in AIML (context, objects, processes) in Clojure For 2., you could even consider, rather than manually doing the conversion, write (in clojure of course, with the help of the xml parsing tools already available) a AIML to clojure-AIML converter :-) (But it really depends on the total estimated time of (your current AIML codebase size, multiplied by the number of times you may have to redo the manual conversion if you change the design of clojure-AIML, multiplied by the mean time of doing the conversion manually), versus the whole time to write and polish an automatic converter :-) -- Laurent Does this sound right? Dirk Luke VanderHart schrieb: On May 6, 4:39 am, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: I realize now that there is no quick fix, and I'll have to learn a lot to do this properly. But are there already enough resources so that I can learn how to do it in Clojure? For example, would there be enough about string processing in Programming Clojure to learn it from theere? Clojure itself is very well documented for a language that's been out for less than two years, and as you can see, there is an active community to turn to for help. With persistence, it's very possible to become a Clojure expert in a short amount of time. I don't imagine you'll have any problem with the language itself. You'll probably have to get some books or look elsewhere for help with the actual algorithms specific to this problem domain, though - I doubt there's any Clojure tutorials dedicated specifically to pattern matching or AI. But anything that can be implemented in another language can be implemented (probably better) in Clojure, so if you know Clojure and you can at least read the examples in the AI literature, you should be good to go. -Luke --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Laurent PETIT wrote: For 2., you could even consider, rather than manually doing the conversion, write (in clojure of course, with the help of the xml parsing tools already available) a AIML to clojure-AIML converter :-) Most of the work will be about figuring out how to map the functional structure from an implementation in a small and specialized language to one in a large and general language - how do I express this or that idea? There are two parts to my prototype; there's a small one I call the grammar, ~200 AIML categories which do all the algorithmic heavy lifting, making use of AIML specialties like conditional branching by recursively matching arbitrary variables, where you can just pass sraiget name=foo//srai to make magic happen - how can I translate this into Clojure? That's not going to be much code, but its likely to be very dense (there are eight years of learning in those 200 AIML categories). So I suspect it'll take me a while until I understand what I need, and I'll not have much code to show for it. And then there's the lexicon, where the content, the words, are encoded as pseudo-objects. These are just files of simple AIML categories, doing mostly substitution and value returns. But lots of them, because AIML was never meant to have objects, so a lot of boilerplate goes into simulating them. However, it worked, basically, but when the whole hootenanny was finally running with a 200 word lexicon, it became clear that the interpreter would blow the lid after 10-12 strokes. Again, translating the ideas will be the challenge; there's just not much code relative to the amount of ideas cristallized there, because AIML is so specialized on this, and the code was developed and optimized over the course of eight years. Once I got it, I expect the Clojure implementation to take a number of parameters from the programmer/writer and create the appropriate object automatically. But that's the vision - I've not even learned the basics yet. Dirk --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Thanks for your suggestion, Stuart, and yes, that's one obvious chice: the AIML interpreter in question - Program D - is written in Java, so why not just learn enough Java to fix the stack, and be done? In fact, this was my first consideration. However, that would be myopic. The reason I have this problem is that the original AIML pattern matching algorithm is not suited for what I want to do (conversations with lots of state, and lots of references to past states to compute present and future output), so I changed it, using the language itself. While it was fun and amazing to learn that I could do this - from what I've read, this seems like a quite lispy thing to do -, I have reason to suspect that it's very inefficient (I do about 30-40 recursions and 10 topic/context switches on an average input, simply because recursion and one contextual extension of the match path is all I have to work with). So I know that I can't fake it by somewhat modifying an existing program, and I'm up for a lot of learning. My current questions are: 1. What would be a good way to learn about how to do matching and string processing in Clojure? 2. Would it be better (or even possible) to learn about matching and string processing in general, independent of the programming language? I know about regex, but that's not enough: I need to learn about matching in context, where context means more matching, or even something like explicit non-matches (hope you can divine my meaning here). Dirk On 6 Mai, 03:29, Stuart Sierra the.stuart.sie...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Dirk, welcome to Clojure! I don't know much about Scala, but I know that Lisp-like languages have long been popular for this sort of language manipulation, so Clojure may be a good one to look at. Some caveats: Clojure does not have a direct equivalent to the pattern/ template style of AIML. Clojure also does not support the structural pattern-matching style found in some other functional languages like Haskell and ML. Multimethods cannot dispatch on composite arguments like [* foo *], although this is an open research area. On the other hand, Clojure has good support for regular expressions, which might be an adequate alternative for text processing. Clojure does not support continuations natively, although Clojure code can still be written in a continuation-passing style. And don't forget Java! There are implementations of AIML (and doubtless other pattern-matching libraries) in Java that you could use from Clojure. -Stuart Sierra On May 5, 12:16 pm, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, my name is Dirk Scheuring, I'm a writer based in Cologne, Germany, and I want to write something about AI that can only be expressed by using AI technology and technique. You could say that what I aim for is a chatbot, but it's a bot that works quiet different from the norm; at it's core, there is a functional program, and on the fringe, there's lots of state information. I have a working prototype, written in AIML, the language in which the famous Alicebot was written. Most bots written in AIML use a simple stimulus-response conception of dialogue, without using (sequences of) state, self-reflection, or other advanced concepts. So some people who have only cursory knowledge of this language think that it's too simple to be doing anything with that might be computationally interesting. I know this to be false. AIML is sort of a micro-version of a Lisp, with String being the only type, and recursion over everything (powerful and dangerous). You can write serious functions with it [1], but you have to abuse it. And I heavily abused the language to make it do what I want. I managed to build a prototype that does something interesting, but only does it for like ten conversational strokes, because then the interpreter's stack overflows, causing an infinite loop. I need to implement my ideas in a different language - one that I don't have to abuse to do complex stuff. I've looked at various functional languages, and have now installed two, Scala and Clojure, doing a couple tutorials at the respective REPLs. I have a hunch that Clojure might turn out to be closer to what I already have in AIML, but I'm not sure yet. Maybe you can help me decide. AIML is an XML dialect; its most important construct is the category/, which has a pattern/ and a template/. This is a default category/, which matches any string: category pattern*/pattern template sraiSOMEFUNCTION/srai /template /category The srai/ element in the template/ means that I invoke the pattern matcher recursivly to match SOMEFUNCTION. How can I express this in Clojure? The next primitive construction I need to translate is substitution: category pattern* RAN */pattern template sraistar index=1/ RUNNING star index=2//srai /template /category This code matches the substring RAN in the
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
2. Would it be better (or even possible) to learn about matching and string processing in general, independent of the programming language? Hi Dirk, it's a pretty advanced topic and quite difficult to get one's head around (at least for me), but monads (both clojure and in general) may be of interest in your quest. Monads are functional techniques which can, among many other things, be used for easily creating recursive descent parsers. There are two excellent clojure tutorials on monads which would be good starting points; http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure-programmers-part-1 http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/monads_101.html Also, take a look at the articles in general on clojure.org - there are many features of clojure which support matching or selecting in it's wider context. Hth, Adrian. On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:57 AM, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for your suggestion, Stuart, and yes, that's one obvious chice: the AIML interpreter in question - Program D - is written in Java, so why not just learn enough Java to fix the stack, and be done? In fact, this was my first consideration. However, that would be myopic. The reason I have this problem is that the original AIML pattern matching algorithm is not suited for what I want to do (conversations with lots of state, and lots of references to past states to compute present and future output), so I changed it, using the language itself. While it was fun and amazing to learn that I could do this - from what I've read, this seems like a quite lispy thing to do -, I have reason to suspect that it's very inefficient (I do about 30-40 recursions and 10 topic/context switches on an average input, simply because recursion and one contextual extension of the match path is all I have to work with). So I know that I can't fake it by somewhat modifying an existing program, and I'm up for a lot of learning. My current questions are: 1. What would be a good way to learn about how to do matching and string processing in Clojure? 2. Would it be better (or even possible) to learn about matching and string processing in general, independent of the programming language? I know about regex, but that's not enough: I need to learn about matching in context, where context means more matching, or even something like explicit non-matches (hope you can divine my meaning here). Dirk On 6 Mai, 03:29, Stuart Sierra the.stuart.sie...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Dirk, welcome to Clojure! I don't know much about Scala, but I know that Lisp-like languages have long been popular for this sort of language manipulation, so Clojure may be a good one to look at. Some caveats: Clojure does not have a direct equivalent to the pattern/ template style of AIML. Clojure also does not support the structural pattern-matching style found in some other functional languages like Haskell and ML. Multimethods cannot dispatch on composite arguments like [* foo *], although this is an open research area. On the other hand, Clojure has good support for regular expressions, which might be an adequate alternative for text processing. Clojure does not support continuations natively, although Clojure code can still be written in a continuation-passing style. And don't forget Java! There are implementations of AIML (and doubtless other pattern-matching libraries) in Java that you could use from Clojure. -Stuart Sierra On May 5, 12:16 pm, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, my name is Dirk Scheuring, I'm a writer based in Cologne, Germany, and I want to write something about AI that can only be expressed by using AI technology and technique. You could say that what I aim for is a chatbot, but it's a bot that works quiet different from the norm; at it's core, there is a functional program, and on the fringe, there's lots of state information. I have a working prototype, written in AIML, the language in which the famous Alicebot was written. Most bots written in AIML use a simple stimulus-response conception of dialogue, without using (sequences of) state, self-reflection, or other advanced concepts. So some people who have only cursory knowledge of this language think that it's too simple to be doing anything with that might be computationally interesting. I know this to be false. AIML is sort of a micro-version of a Lisp, with String being the only type, and recursion over everything (powerful and dangerous). You can write serious functions with it [1], but you have to abuse it. And I heavily abused the language to make it do what I want. I managed to build a prototype that does something interesting, but only does it for like ten conversational strokes, because then the interpreter's stack overflows, causing an infinite loop. I need to implement my ideas in a different language - one that I don't have to abuse to do complex stuff. I've looked at various
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Luke VanderHart wrote: It actually sounds very like the classic exercise of building a logic- based language similar to Prolog in Scheme or Lisp, only with an AI/ pattern matching functionality instead of a logic resolution engine. Exactly - I'm doing much of the logic directly in the pattern matching, using a subset of the English language where words and phrases are computational objects which have methods that enable them to be parts of sentences. I realize now that there is no quick fix, and I'll have to learn a lot to do this properly. But are there already enough resources so that I can learn how to do it in Clojure? For example, would there be enough about string processing in Programming Clojure to learn it from theere? Dirk --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Adrian Cuthbertson wrote: There are two excellent clojure tutorials on monads which would be good starting points; Thanks, I bet that'll be useful, too. I already have a rough understanding of what monads do, so having them presented in the context of Clojure may help me. Dirk --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
On May 6, 2009, at 1:57 AM, dhs827 wrote: 2. Would it be better (or even possible) to learn about matching and string processing in general, independent of the programming language? I know about regex, but that's not enough: I need to learn about matching in context, where context means more matching, or even something like explicit non-matches (hope you can divine my meaning here). This may not be what you're looking for but in general, if regular expressions are not enough, the solution may be to investigate context- free and (especially in your case) context-sensitive languages, which are really the next two levels of expressiveness above regular expressions. I think language design and compiler implementation might be quite useful to you in an oblique way, but it could also be a blind alley. On the other hand, NLP work (AFAICT) seems to focus more on analysis and less on interaction, so that might not be of much use to you either. For a historical perspective, you might want to look at SNOBOL, the String Oriented Symbolic Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL , http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/. No recursion in it, however, IIRC. Prolog's definite clause grammars come to mind too as another thing to look into (and recursion friendly) but this is more focussed on grammar than on strings per se. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_clause_grammar Most of the tools out there either deal with strings simply or with grammars. I hope I misunderstood the phrase explicit non-matches, because I believe that problem is intractable, or at least leads to unpleasantries like negation of the expression foo being [^f]|[^f] [^o]|[^f][^o][^o]|f[^o]|fo[^o]|f$|fo$|^$, which I'm not even sure would really work and I doubt looks more tractable or pleasant from context-free or context-sensitive languages. Imagine what that would be like for a complicated expression. Also there's a difference between the negation of a match and the match of a negated expression; negating I have a match doesn't seem to be the same as negating I have no match—what's the location, length and content of the negated non-match? (Am I high?) I do suspect that whatever you come up with is going to look like a separate language regardless of what language you implement it in, simply because it doesn't seem to resemble anything anyone else is doing at the moment. I hope you'll keep us abreast of your progress. It will be enlightening. — Daniel Lyons http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It! --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Daniel Lyons wrote: I hope I misunderstood the phrase explicit non-matches, because I believe that problem is intractable, or at least leads to unpleasantries like negation of the expression foo being [^f]|[^f] [^o]|[^f][^o][^o]|f[^o]|fo[^o]|f$|fo$|^$, which I'm not even sure would really work and I doubt looks more tractable or pleasant from context-free or context-sensitive languages. Imagine what that would be like for a complicated expression. Also there's a difference between the negation of a match and the match of a negated expression; negating I have a match doesn't seem to be the same as negating I have no match—what's the location, length and content of the negated non-match? (Am I high?) Explicit non-match means that nil can mean well-defined things in particular contexts. No voodoo goin' on here. It means that, if the bot gets an input string that it can't even partially match, it looks at the current context - like, in which mode ist the conversation currently? -, and computes an output from that. So an explicit non- match for a particular nil might be (list OS B C), a memory address at which there is a function which computes the output for this nil in this context. The problem of negation is different, and has to be dealt with explicitly (the meaningful nil is something the bot does, but doesn't necessarily discuss, so it's an implicit thing). And my solution to negation is that, in fact, for every object the bot can discuss, there must be an equaly-dimensioned non-object, and every mention of verbing behavior necessitates the existence of an explicitly mentionable non-verbing behavior. The user must be able to negate everything (because they will!). If you have two distinct objects, then double-negation simply can self-eliminate, and even if you get input where there's 17 times negation prefixed to the object, the worst that can happen is you have to throw them off, pair-wise, recursively (of course, there'll be larger patterns for frequently called bullshit). Gee, this seems like a live bunch of people here. Dirk Dirk --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
On May 6, 4:39 am, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: I realize now that there is no quick fix, and I'll have to learn a lot to do this properly. But are there already enough resources so that I can learn how to do it in Clojure? For example, would there be enough about string processing in Programming Clojure to learn it from theere? Clojure itself is very well documented for a language that's been out for less than two years, and as you can see, there is an active community to turn to for help. With persistence, it's very possible to become a Clojure expert in a short amount of time. I don't imagine you'll have any problem with the language itself. You'll probably have to get some books or look elsewhere for help with the actual algorithms specific to this problem domain, though - I doubt there's any Clojure tutorials dedicated specifically to pattern matching or AI. But anything that can be implemented in another language can be implemented (probably better) in Clojure, so if you know Clojure and you can at least read the examples in the AI literature, you should be good to go. -Luke --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Hi, my name is Dirk Scheuring, I'm a writer based in Cologne, Germany, and I want to write something about AI that can only be expressed by using AI technology and technique. You could say that what I aim for is a chatbot, but it's a bot that works quiet different from the norm; at it's core, there is a functional program, and on the fringe, there's lots of state information. I have a working prototype, written in AIML, the language in which the famous Alicebot was written. Most bots written in AIML use a simple stimulus-response conception of dialogue, without using (sequences of) state, self-reflection, or other advanced concepts. So some people who have only cursory knowledge of this language think that it's too simple to be doing anything with that might be computationally interesting. I know this to be false. AIML is sort of a micro-version of a Lisp, with String being the only type, and recursion over everything (powerful and dangerous). You can write serious functions with it [1], but you have to abuse it. And I heavily abused the language to make it do what I want. I managed to build a prototype that does something interesting, but only does it for like ten conversational strokes, because then the interpreter's stack overflows, causing an infinite loop. I need to implement my ideas in a different language - one that I don't have to abuse to do complex stuff. I've looked at various functional languages, and have now installed two, Scala and Clojure, doing a couple tutorials at the respective REPLs. I have a hunch that Clojure might turn out to be closer to what I already have in AIML, but I'm not sure yet. Maybe you can help me decide. AIML is an XML dialect; its most important construct is the category/ , which has a pattern/ and a template/. This is a default category/, which matches any string: category pattern*/pattern template sraiSOMEFUNCTION/srai /template /category The srai/ element in the template/ means that I invoke the pattern matcher recursivly to match SOMEFUNCTION. How can I express this in Clojure? The next primitive construction I need to translate is substitution: category pattern* RAN */pattern template sraistar index=1/ RUNNING star index=2//srai /template /category This code matches the substring RAN in the middle of a set of other substrings, and substitutes it for RUNNING, leaving the values before and after it untouched for the next recursion. And I need to know how to do: category pattern* MADONNA */pattern template think set name=celebrityMadonna/set /think sraistar index=1/ star index=2//srai /template /category The above category extracts a substring from the input and saves it to a (global) variable; the other substrings are up for another round of pattern matching. Another important low-level one is: topic name=* MYTOPIC * category pattern*/pattern template sraiSOMEOTHERFUNCTION/srai /template /category /topic This is again the catch-all * pattern, but in a context, represented by the substring MYTOPIC in between these other substrings. So in this case, the default pattern/ has a template/ that calls SOMEOTHERFUNCTION. Is this something I would do with Multimethods in Clojure? There's lots more, but this is the primitive stuff that I need to comprehend first. My model does what I call semantic compression - it transforms and analytically stores (parts of) the input string -, then finds a matching object which has methods to generate facts and rules, the core of an output, which might then be extended front and back, depending on what's in the input and what's in the current state (that's semantic expansion)...and finally, the first letter of the output is cast to uppercase, a dot or bang or questionmark is put at the end, and a special object writes the formated output (say, to a webpage, or to an IRC channel). I know how to do this in AIML, at least up to the point when the interpreter crashes, because I used the language in a way it wasn't designed to be used (but it's valid AIML - the spec allows some unmentioned things; plus it is functional, with continuation-passing to boot). I want to learn how to do this in Clojure, and appreciate any pointers and tips. Best regards, Dirk Scheuring [1] Simple FP example in AIML: http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-style/2002-September/000231.html --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Clojure group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
First of all, this is a very interesting question. I definitely wish I had more time to think about it and maybe put together some code - unfortunately I don't. Clojure does sound like it would be good for this kind of processing. This is an ideal example of where it would be incredibly powerful to built up a domain specific language from Clojure using macros, allowing both the full expressivity of AIML and the full power of Clojure when necessary. That said, just from reading your post - Clojure is a much less specialized language than AIML appears to be, particularly in the area of pattern matching in the strings. You will either have to find a Java (or Clojure) library that does this, or write the Clojure yourself. It's definitely possible, but I'm afraid there's no way to avoid actually getting dirty and writing the pattern-finding code (unless you can find a library that does exactly what you want, and wrap it). My intuition is that it would be fairly easy to get something that just works - a lot can probably be done with Clojure's regular expression capability. But I have a feeling that in order to get high- performance code, you'll have to do a lot of indexing and caching which could potentially get complex. All in all, I think Clojure's a great language for this, but in order to replicate some of the advanced features of a made-for-ai specialized language you're going to have to do some non-trivial coding to basically recreate those features of AIML that are unique. This is true of Clojure or any other general-purpose programming language. Whether it's worth the effort is up to you, but if you can do a good job I bet there'd be a lot of interested people. It actually sounds very like the classic exercise of building a logic- based language similar to Prolog in Scheme or Lisp, only with an AI/ pattern matching functionality instead of a logic resolution engine. I'll look over your questions in more detail later, if I have time, and see if I can provide any more specific input. Thanks! -Luke On May 5, 12:16 pm, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, my name is Dirk Scheuring, I'm a writer based in Cologne, Germany, and I want to write something about AI that can only be expressed by using AI technology and technique. You could say that what I aim for is a chatbot, but it's a bot that works quiet different from the norm; at it's core, there is a functional program, and on the fringe, there's lots of state information. I have a working prototype, written in AIML, the language in which the famous Alicebot was written. Most bots written in AIML use a simple stimulus-response conception of dialogue, without using (sequences of) state, self-reflection, or other advanced concepts. So some people who have only cursory knowledge of this language think that it's too simple to be doing anything with that might be computationally interesting. I know this to be false. AIML is sort of a micro-version of a Lisp, with String being the only type, and recursion over everything (powerful and dangerous). You can write serious functions with it [1], but you have to abuse it. And I heavily abused the language to make it do what I want. I managed to build a prototype that does something interesting, but only does it for like ten conversational strokes, because then the interpreter's stack overflows, causing an infinite loop. I need to implement my ideas in a different language - one that I don't have to abuse to do complex stuff. I've looked at various functional languages, and have now installed two, Scala and Clojure, doing a couple tutorials at the respective REPLs. I have a hunch that Clojure might turn out to be closer to what I already have in AIML, but I'm not sure yet. Maybe you can help me decide. AIML is an XML dialect; its most important construct is the category/, which has a pattern/ and a template/. This is a default category/, which matches any string: category pattern*/pattern template sraiSOMEFUNCTION/srai /template /category The srai/ element in the template/ means that I invoke the pattern matcher recursivly to match SOMEFUNCTION. How can I express this in Clojure? The next primitive construction I need to translate is substitution: category pattern* RAN */pattern template sraistar index=1/ RUNNING star index=2//srai /template /category This code matches the substring RAN in the middle of a set of other substrings, and substitutes it for RUNNING, leaving the values before and after it untouched for the next recursion. And I need to know how to do: category pattern* MADONNA */pattern template think set name=celebrityMadonna/set /think sraistar index=1/ star index=2//srai /template /category The above category extracts a substring from the input and saves it to a (global) variable; the other substrings are up for another round of pattern matching. Another important low-level
Re: Writer turned programmer seeks string processing advice
Hi Dirk, welcome to Clojure! I don't know much about Scala, but I know that Lisp-like languages have long been popular for this sort of language manipulation, so Clojure may be a good one to look at. Some caveats: Clojure does not have a direct equivalent to the pattern/ template style of AIML. Clojure also does not support the structural pattern-matching style found in some other functional languages like Haskell and ML. Multimethods cannot dispatch on composite arguments like [* foo *], although this is an open research area. On the other hand, Clojure has good support for regular expressions, which might be an adequate alternative for text processing. Clojure does not support continuations natively, although Clojure code can still be written in a continuation-passing style. And don't forget Java! There are implementations of AIML (and doubtless other pattern-matching libraries) in Java that you could use from Clojure. -Stuart Sierra On May 5, 12:16 pm, dhs827 scheur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, my name is Dirk Scheuring, I'm a writer based in Cologne, Germany, and I want to write something about AI that can only be expressed by using AI technology and technique. You could say that what I aim for is a chatbot, but it's a bot that works quiet different from the norm; at it's core, there is a functional program, and on the fringe, there's lots of state information. I have a working prototype, written in AIML, the language in which the famous Alicebot was written. Most bots written in AIML use a simple stimulus-response conception of dialogue, without using (sequences of) state, self-reflection, or other advanced concepts. So some people who have only cursory knowledge of this language think that it's too simple to be doing anything with that might be computationally interesting. I know this to be false. AIML is sort of a micro-version of a Lisp, with String being the only type, and recursion over everything (powerful and dangerous). You can write serious functions with it [1], but you have to abuse it. And I heavily abused the language to make it do what I want. I managed to build a prototype that does something interesting, but only does it for like ten conversational strokes, because then the interpreter's stack overflows, causing an infinite loop. I need to implement my ideas in a different language - one that I don't have to abuse to do complex stuff. I've looked at various functional languages, and have now installed two, Scala and Clojure, doing a couple tutorials at the respective REPLs. I have a hunch that Clojure might turn out to be closer to what I already have in AIML, but I'm not sure yet. Maybe you can help me decide. AIML is an XML dialect; its most important construct is the category/, which has a pattern/ and a template/. This is a default category/, which matches any string: category pattern*/pattern template sraiSOMEFUNCTION/srai /template /category The srai/ element in the template/ means that I invoke the pattern matcher recursivly to match SOMEFUNCTION. How can I express this in Clojure? The next primitive construction I need to translate is substitution: category pattern* RAN */pattern template sraistar index=1/ RUNNING star index=2//srai /template /category This code matches the substring RAN in the middle of a set of other substrings, and substitutes it for RUNNING, leaving the values before and after it untouched for the next recursion. And I need to know how to do: category pattern* MADONNA */pattern template think set name=celebrityMadonna/set /think sraistar index=1/ star index=2//srai /template /category The above category extracts a substring from the input and saves it to a (global) variable; the other substrings are up for another round of pattern matching. Another important low-level one is: topic name=* MYTOPIC * category pattern*/pattern template sraiSOMEOTHERFUNCTION/srai /template /category /topic This is again the catch-all * pattern, but in a context, represented by the substring MYTOPIC in between these other substrings. So in this case, the default pattern/ has a template/ that calls SOMEOTHERFUNCTION. Is this something I would do with Multimethods in Clojure? There's lots more, but this is the primitive stuff that I need to comprehend first. My model does what I call semantic compression - it transforms and analytically stores (parts of) the input string -, then finds a matching object which has methods to generate facts and rules, the core of an output, which might then be extended front and back, depending on what's in the input and what's in the current state (that's semantic expansion)...and finally, the first letter of the output is cast to uppercase, a dot or bang or questionmark is put at the end, and a special object writes the formated output (say, to a webpage, or to an IRC
