Low Hanging Fruit
We still have lots of test cases to try and pass. Some of them are easy and some of them will be pretty hard. Today I’m going to knock out a few of the easier ones.
Specifically, I’m going to try to get DELPHI to notice when a user has made a simple grammar mistake in their question. Things like starting a sentence with “Why” but not including a question mark at the end or ending a sentence with a question mark but not beginning with any question words that DELPHI recognizes. When a user makes this kind of mistake we want to point it out to them and give them a quick hint about how to better format their questions to get a good response out of DELPHI.
I Don’t Understand The Question
Here’s the first test case I want to work with:
Test Case 7 Failed!!!
Input: Pumpkin mice word salad?
Output: I don’t want to talk about that. Please ask me a question
Expected: I’m sorry, could you try rewording that?
This test case represents a user who has typed a question that DELPHI doesn’t understand. At least, we think it’s a question since it has a question mark at the end. So we want to suggest to the user that they reword the question in a simpler way. Hopefully this will convince users who type things like “Dodgers win the world series?” to try again with the better formatted “Will the Dodgers win the world series?”
The rule for this is pretty simple. We just create a low priority rule that matches a question mark anywhere in the user’s input. We let the high priority rules catch all the good input with question marks and then use this rule to clean up whatever is left.
push(@chatPatterns, [qr/\?/, "I'm sorry, could you try rewording that?"]);
I put his rule in the system right above the final catch all pattern. I’m sure you can figure out why I didn’t try to put it after the catch all pattern. In any case:
Test Case 7 Passed
Is That Supposed To Be A Question?
Here’s the second test case I plan on fixing today:
Test Case 9 Failed!!!
Input: Why do you say things like that
Output: I don’t want to talk about that. Please ask me a question
Expected: Did you forget a question mark? Grammar is important!
This test case is the opposite of the last test case. This time the user input starts with a well recognized question word but it doesn’t end with a question mark. We want to remind the user that question marks are important so they can rewrite the question in a format the DELPHI will understand.
This is another easy low-priority rule. Once again we put it near the end of our rule list to make sure that it only catches question word input that didn’t match any of the previous, better rules.
I am introducing some new regex syntax here though. The ‘|’ symbols stand for “or” and lets us create a regular expression that will match any one item from a list of possibilities. That way we can build one rule to catch lots of different question word beginning inputs.
push(@chatPatterns, [qr/\A(Why|Is|Are|Do|Does|Will)/, "Did you forget a question mark? Grammar is important!"]);
Besides the new “or” syntax there shouldn’t be anything surprising here. I start out with the \A anchor to indicate that we’re only looking for input that starts with a question word and then I make a list of all the common question words I expect DELPHI to run into.
I put this low priority rule after the question mark rule I just wrote but still before the catch all rule for the obvious reason that the catch all rule always needs to be last.
Test Case 9 Passed
Conclusion
With these two new rules DELPHI is now ready to criticize the grammar of anyone who dares to try to ask it a poorly formatted question. And our success rate is slowly creeping upwards!
Passed 6 out of 11 tests
Test Failure!!!
Sadly the test cases we are still failing happen to be the tricky ones, so we’re going to have to start doing some clever programming in the near future. But before that let’s take a little detour and build an actual user interface for DELPHI so that we can talk to it. I’m tired of letting the automated tests have all the fun, I want to talk to the chatbot too!