4 ms·

Auto complete would be a good option, however I want people to be able to send the commands in emails (with the option on the web page too). Having started sca

by fendale 18y ago

Auto complete would be a good option, however I want people to be able to send the commands in emails (with the option on the web page too). Having started scanning about NLP, I can tell its a big area, and I don't think I want to invest lots of time into this. Perhaps a cutdown syntax is the way to go. For my small set of commands, all I have now are TODOs, Followups and Reminders. So a few ways of entering each of them and some thinking about dates should get me something usable. That said, I do have concerns about the ambiguity of what can be entered, and what to do with failed commands etc. Dates really are the pain point for entering things - date pickers are generally annoying, and a series of drop downs are a pain too and people write dates in so many different ways!

markessien 18y ago
How about just using a fixed syntax: -- email start * Pick Milk * Buy Fags * Drop Children at Mary @ 16:00 --- Then use a python date parse to parse whatever comes after @. You don't need to split reminders or followups, because an @ symbol would automatically imply a reminder, innit?
- fendale 18y ago
  The use of the @ symbol may well be a good idea to split out the dates and separate remindable things from non-remindable.
  - eru 18y ago
    You should have an escape mechanism handy for the notation of email-addresses, though.
AvengerPenguin 18y ago
Also remember that some ways are impossible to tell apart. 12/10/2008, for example, is 12th October for us in the UK, but 10th December for Americans. There's simply no way to guess at which it is without some context or the user saying which. What that shows is that while NLP can make systems seem quite intelligent, it's really not a replacement for the user putting some thought into it too. Forms work nicely as they can force input into certain formats. I like NLP, so I always think systems could at least meet a human half way on this. However, even if we were talking face to face, there's some social expectation you'll try to make some sense (i.e. speak in English). You wouldn't just speak Spanish to me if I hadn't indicated I could speak Spanish. AI-like systems are meant to be intelligent, not psychic -- a point often forgotten by some people. A dialogue system would help uncertainties since it could ask for clarification (which, frankly, is all we humans do if something's not clear when talking to each other), but if you're talking over email, you really want to get it right the first time as it's not the fastest system. Again, off the top of my head: I'd say you could make it clear that the subject of the email has to be one of "reminder", "followup" or "todo"... then do some aggressive normalisation on the subject lines that come in (grab a Porter Stemmer or even just take the first 3/4 letters maybe) then force to upper or lower and then check against a massive list of synonyms. Then you simply have to bounce with a help notice if someone really still managed to enter something stupid. Examples: Subject: Reminder -> REMINDER -> REM -> matches rule for "REM/EVE/HOL" (Reminder, event, holiday) Subject: event -> EVENT -> EVE -> matches rule for "REM/EVE/HOL" Subject: follow-up -> FOLLOW-UP -> FOL -> matches rule for "FOL/REV" (follow-up, review) That sort of idea. It accounts for RaNDom CapITAlisation, uncertain hyphen-usage and plurals. Make those match rules long enough and you might get error rate pretty low indeed. I know you've probably already gone over this, but does it really need to be email? Is that the best interface? Is it worth taking a step back (going outside the box, as they say) and working out the most efficient method?
- fendale 18y ago
  There is some good advice coming up in this thread. A few people are suggesting email is not the correct medium, so I need to explain more what it is I am trying to achieve. My app is sort of like 'I Want Sandy' (I started working on this before I even heard about I Want Sandy, as I only came to know of it now that its about to be shut down). Basically, I want to be able to take an email sent to me, and forward it to a drop box. I can either just send the email in as is (received emails have certain information extracted from them and displayed on a dash board), or I can send it in with a command on it, or several commands. So I can fire in an email saying followup in 2 days/on Dec 12th etc, and in two days time, the app will send me an email along with the original email attached. If I add a command as TODO, then it will add it to the TODO list attached to that drop box etc. There will of course be a non-ambiguous web front end to all this to manage all the items, and add followups, todo's etc without an email, but my goal is to be able to add items from your inbox.
  - AvengerPenguin 18y ago
    Ah, that's quite a neat idea really. I do think you're going to have to stick to a fixed syntax here though. People are already familiar with the standards of "Re: and Fw:" on the Internet, so it's not that far-fetched for people to learn "Todo:", "Followup:" and "Remind:". My overall suggestion would be to go with that (you could even tell users to press the "forward" button then replace "fw" with one of three commands). Then you can go with my suggestion of normalising caps, punctuation and even stemming to the first few letters to as to make it as forgiving as possible. e.g., FOL would even match a typo like Fololw-up ;-) That way, it could expect all subject lines in the form: Command: Text @ Date with date being optional perhaps. A standard regex or even just a split() would be fine here. If there's an error at any point, a standard help bounce would be good (think the --help text you get when you misuse a UNIX command). I really don't think it's unreasonable to expect users to get the command bit right, so the problem really is reduced to getting the date bit parsed correctly for which I've seen two suggestions here already. p.s. One possible future thing could be to make extensions for things like Thunderbird that actually gives a "Todo", "Remind" and "Follow-up" buttons alongside the "Reply" and "Forward" buttons ;-)

by fendale 18y ago

markessien 18y ago

How about just using a fixed syntax: -- email start * Pick Milk * Buy Fags * Drop Children at Mary @ 16:00 --- Then use a python date parse to parse whatever comes after @. You don't need to split reminders or followups, because an @ symbol would automatically imply a reminder, innit?

fendale 18y ago
The use of the @ symbol may well be a good idea to split out the dates and separate remindable things from non-remindable.
- eru 18y ago
  You should have an escape mechanism handy for the notation of email-addresses, though.

AvengerPenguin 18y ago

Also remember that some ways are impossible to tell apart. 12/10/2008, for example, is 12th October for us in the UK, but 10th December for Americans. There's simply no way to guess at which it is without some context or the user saying which. What that shows is that while NLP can make systems seem quite intelligent, it's really not a replacement for the user putting some thought into it too. Forms work nicely as they can force input into certain formats. I like NLP, so I always think systems could at least meet a human half way on this. However, even if we were talking face to face, there's some social expectation you'll try to make some sense (i.e. speak in English). You wouldn't just speak Spanish to me if I hadn't indicated I could speak Spanish. AI-like systems are meant to be intelligent, not psychic -- a point often forgotten by some people. A dialogue system would help uncertainties since it could ask for clarification (which, frankly, is all we humans do if something's not clear when talking to each other), but if you're talking over email, you really want to get it right the first time as it's not the fastest system. Again, off the top of my head: I'd say you could make it clear that the subject of the email has to be one of "reminder", "followup" or "todo"... then do some aggressive normalisation on the subject lines that come in (grab a Porter Stemmer or even just take the first 3/4 letters maybe) then force to upper or lower and then check against a massive list of synonyms. Then you simply have to bounce with a help notice if someone really still managed to enter something stupid. Examples: Subject: Reminder -> REMINDER -> REM -> matches rule for "REM/EVE/HOL" (Reminder, event, holiday) Subject: event -> EVENT -> EVE -> matches rule for "REM/EVE/HOL" Subject: follow-up -> FOLLOW-UP -> FOL -> matches rule for "FOL/REV" (follow-up, review) That sort of idea. It accounts for RaNDom CapITAlisation, uncertain hyphen-usage and plurals. Make those match rules long enough and you might get error rate pretty low indeed. I know you've probably already gone over this, but does it really need to be email? Is that the best interface? Is it worth taking a step back (going outside the box, as they say) and working out the most efficient method?

fendale 18y ago
There is some good advice coming up in this thread. A few people are suggesting email is not the correct medium, so I need to explain more what it is I am trying to achieve. My app is sort of like 'I Want Sandy' (I started working on this before I even heard about I Want Sandy, as I only came to know of it now that its about to be shut down). Basically, I want to be able to take an email sent to me, and forward it to a drop box. I can either just send the email in as is (received emails have certain information extracted from them and displayed on a dash board), or I can send it in with a command on it, or several commands. So I can fire in an email saying followup in 2 days/on Dec 12th etc, and in two days time, the app will send me an email along with the original email attached. If I add a command as TODO, then it will add it to the TODO list attached to that drop box etc. There will of course be a non-ambiguous web front end to all this to manage all the items, and add followups, todo's etc without an email, but my goal is to be able to add items from your inbox.
- AvengerPenguin 18y ago
  Ah, that's quite a neat idea really. I do think you're going to have to stick to a fixed syntax here though. People are already familiar with the standards of "Re: and Fw:" on the Internet, so it's not that far-fetched for people to learn "Todo:", "Followup:" and "Remind:". My overall suggestion would be to go with that (you could even tell users to press the "forward" button then replace "fw" with one of three commands). Then you can go with my suggestion of normalising caps, punctuation and even stemming to the first few letters to as to make it as forgiving as possible. e.g., FOL would even match a typo like Fololw-up ;-) That way, it could expect all subject lines in the form: Command: Text @ Date with date being optional perhaps. A standard regex or even just a split() would be fine here. If there's an error at any point, a standard help bounce would be good (think the --help text you get when you misuse a UNIX command). I really don't think it's unreasonable to expect users to get the command bit right, so the problem really is reduced to getting the date bit parsed correctly for which I've seen two suggestions here already. p.s. One possible future thing could be to make extensions for things like Thunderbird that actually gives a "Todo", "Remind" and "Follow-up" buttons alongside the "Reply" and "Forward" buttons ;-)