From kde-usability  Fri Jun 04 22:04:58 2004
From: Peter Postmus <p.postmus () st ! hanze ! nl>
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 22:04:58 +0000
To: kde-usability
Subject: Re: Easier Searching in KDE
Message-Id: <200406050004.58446.p.postmus () st ! hanze ! nl>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=108638673420261

On Friday 04 June 2004 22:10, Jonathan Gardner wrote:
> On Friday 04 June 2004 09:32 am, Jamethiel Knorth wrote:
> > We don't need to use something like ALICE. The system would probably
> > benefit more from a grammar parsing system. This is what GNOME Storage
> > [1] uses, depending on a Head-Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) parser [2]
> > and a set of Grammar Rules [3]. I would say that GNOME Storage already
> > qualifies as a proof of concept, presuming it works as well as the page
> > and its screenshots imply.
>
> I think you're missing the core functionality of how ALICE works. It is a
> grammar parser. It takes what you write, does a whole lot of pattern
> matching and parsing, and then generates a response. ALICE is also
> stateful. It will remember what "it" is, for instance.

This reminds me of a course I took last year, involving the language Prolog. 
It's entirely based on relations. No objects, no imperative programming. Just 
defining rules and relationships. I still don't quite understand it ;).

>
> > Also, this isn't as useful in most search areas. It is great when
> > everything on the system is well tracked in a single database, but
> > doesn't work so well if the database is unreliable. This makes it great
> > for querying the help system, the configuration system, the menu, or
> > anything else that is entirely controlled. However, it is far less useful
> > when just searching for files according to their names.
>
> Yes. It would be unsuitable for searching anything that changes. It would
> probably only be limited to the help system.
>
> In the future, perhaps we can discover a way to make it interact more with
> the system and be able to render more relevant responses on data that does
> change, however. I understand that they have ALICE bots that actually
> modify their database to match the person they converse with, and to learn
> new things, so we would probably want a feature like that.
>
> Someone has tied ALICE into a speech recognition and speech synthesis
> system so that you can talk to it. They are also engineering a way to
> identify facial expressions and to generate appropriate expressions as
> well. Again, this is all future stuff, but the text-to-text static database
> is already well-done.

Cool. Although I have my doubts about speech recognition as an efficient way 
to operate a computer today, it could become useful in the future.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten,
With kind regards,

Peter Postmus

WWW: http://starbase218.ath.cx
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