[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Cynbe ru Taren]

Ben Greear (greear at cyberhighway.net) asks:

| However, has anyone ever done any study or seen anything that proports
| to explain what a common (for some value of common) user would like?
| In other words, usability?
| 
| For instance, which of these would you chose to type:
| get the sword from the second bag
| get sword 2.bag
| ge sw 2.bag

I've been keeping quiet since being politely ridiculed for suggesting
that it would make more sense to research what the last people to do
all this found out than to re-discover it all the hard way.

But since you ask, there -have- been such studies (couple decades
back, so I can't quote chapter and verse from memory) and it was found
that user's resent having to type fluff: They quickly figure out the
minimum needed to make the machine understand, and switch to it.

Most quick and dirty "natural language input" parsers pretty much
ignore most prepositions and such, and as soon as users figure
this out (which doesn't take long) they stop entering them.

---Above is study results, below is my personal interpretation---

The simple fact is that natural language is optimized for
communication between human-level intelligences, and as long as the
computer end exhibits less than human-level intelligence, "natural
language" will be a poor solution to the communication problem.

What -users- want is a simple, compact notation with easy to
understand meaning.  (Lots of conflicts and trade-offs hidden in that
spec, of course!)

What attempts to do "natural language parsing" usually produce are the
opposite: complex, verbose, inconsistent notations where it is
anybody's guess what the machine will do in response to a given input.
Normal users find this very frustrating.  Predictability is -very-
high on the list of what users want from a computer interface.

There's a common myth that natural language would make a great
programming language if only we could write compilers for it.

This is flat-out WRONG.

Remember that Algol was invented well before electronic computers,
simply because natural language sucks as a medium for giving precise
directions, even between humans.

Mathematicians similarly developed math notation because natural
language is completely inadequate for precise communication.

In specific answer to your question, any normal user given the choice
will quickly progress to using the third of your three choices.  The
earlier ones will be preferred, if at all, only as transitional forms
useful for flattening the initial learning curve.  To the best of my
knowledge.  ("bag.2" or "bag2" "bag 2" would probably be preferred to
"2.bag" though, imho.)

 Cynbe


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