NOTE: This blog post has now been added to the Ubiquity wiki and is updated there. Please disregard this article and instead follow these instructions.
You’ve seen the video. You speak another language. And you’re wondering, “how hard is it to add my language to Ubiquity with Parser 2?” The answer: not that hard. With a little bit of JavaScript and knowledge of and interest in your own language, you’ll be able to get at least rudimentary Ubiquity functionality in your language. Follow along in this step by step guide and please submit your (even incomplete) language files!
As Ubiquity Parser 2 evolves, there is a chance that this specification will change in the future. Keep abreast of such changes on the Ubiquity Planet and/or this blog (RSS).
There are two challenges to implementing so-called command chaining, but only one of them is choosing a linguistically appropriate structural standard and parsing it. The other is the underlying difficulty of processing each individual “clause” in sequence, asynchronously. Alex Fritze blogged about how a project like his own Oni could dramatically simplify this underlying process.
but I cannot instruct it to give me list of translated google results:
translate (google foo) to German // doesn't work
Or email me the resulting list:
email(translate (google foo) to German) // doesn't work
…So how does Oni relate to this? Oni is a browser-based “embedded structured concurrency framework”. It allows you to write asynchronous code as if it was synchronous, adding back the kind-of composibility that is lost when juggling concurrent strands of execution (such as e.g. pending XMLHttpRequests) with ‘conventional’ sequential languages.
A while back I created a count command for Ubiquity to count HTML elements on a page, so I’ll share it here. The idea is super simple: select some text on your page and execute count p to get the number of paragraphs, or count a to get the number of links, or count tr to get the number of table rows. This is super useful when reading articles with charts or lists online and you want to know how many there are without doing something like copy-pasting into Excel.
The count command is built using jQuery so it can even understand targets like p.class or a[href=...]. Give it a try! ^^
I just spent some time reviewing how Ubiquity currently ranks its suggestions in relation to to Parser The Next Generation so I thought I’d put some of these thoughts down in writing.
The issue of ranking Ubiquity suggestions can be restated as predicting an optimal output given a certain input and various conflicting considerations. Ubiquity (1.8, as of this writing) computes four “scores” for each suggestion:
I just made a screencast with Foxkeh to demo the Ubiquity next generation parser demo and to demonstrate how easy it is to add your own language. Foxkeh wants you to localize the parser into your language. How could you say no? ^^
There are some details which are not covered in this introductory video, such as how to deal with case marking languages or languages without spaces. Hopefully this’ll inspire some people to play with the demo, though. I’d love to hear your comments! ^^
A week or two ago while visiting California, Jono and I had a productive charrette, resulting in a new architecture proposal for the Ubiquity parser, as laid out in Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation. The new architecture is designed to support (1) the use of overlord verbs, (2) writing verbs by semantic roles, and (3) better suggestions for verb-final languages and other argument-first contexts. I’m happy to say that I’ve spent some time putting a proof-of-concept together.
I’ve implemented the basic algorithm of this parser for left-branching languages (like English) and also implemented some fake English verbs, noun types, and semantic roles. This demo should give you a basic sense of how this parser will attempt to identify different types of arguments and check their noun types even without clearly knowing the verb. This should make the suggestion ranking much smarter, particularly for verb-final contexts. (For a good example, try from Tokyo to San Francisco.)
A few weeks ago I made some visual mockups of how Ubiquity could look and act in Japanese. Part of this proposal was what I called “particle identification”: that is, immediate in-line identification of delimiters of arguments, which can be overridden by the user:
The inspiration for this idea came from Aza’s blog post “Solving the ‘it’ problem” which advocates for this type of quick feedback to the user in cases of ambiguity. Such a method would help both the user better understand what is being interpreted by the system, as well as offer an opportunity for the user to correct improper parses. I just tried mocking up such an input box using jQuery.
