AI Zone Admin Forum Add your forum

NEWS: Chatbots.org survey on 3000 US and UK consumers shows it is time for chatbot integration in customer service!read more..

Amanda’s question box
 
 

Ok, I don’t want to keep tacking on my questions to other people’s threads. And I don’t want to create clutter by creating another thread every time I have a question. So I am making a new thread for all the random questions that pop into my head.

First question: I have run across a few times where one category seems to supersede another such as “* bye” and “_ bye”. I haven’t been able to think of why one would bother having “* bye” if “_ bye” always take over. Will “* bye” ever be expressed? Why not just remove one of them? Or what abotu duplicate patterns. The last one in order always wins right? So why have a duplicate pattern?

Thanks!

 

 
  [ # 1 ]

If you have “_ bye”, there is no point in having “* bye”, as it will never be called. Having duplicate patterns is bad practice, the latter one will always take priority. Good housekeeping of your bot should include removing duplicates if you see them.

There used to be a tool called ShadowChecker.exe on the net in which you could load your AIML and it would spot duplicates and shadowed categories. A shadowed category is one which would never be called as another one supersedes it, as in your _ bye example.

 

 
  [ # 2 ]

Thanks. I was playing around with some of the aiml files out there and went to the trouble of altering “* bye” and then when I tested it the “_ bye” which I hadn’t seen took over. I immediately wanted to clean it up, but being new to this, I thought perhaps there was a reason. But now I know I can search and destroy! LOL

 

 
  login or register to react
‹‹ AIML Sample: Queues      My first AIML code ››