Ecolect

Ecolect helps with parsing natural language to intents and values. This can be used as a part in building a natural language interface for things such as bots, voice or search interfaces.

Installation

$ npm install --save ecolect

Matching intents

The main function of Ecolect is to match natural language expressions to intents. Every expression is parsed into tokens that are matched and scored using a language specific comparison function. This allows the library to match for example cookies even if the user skipped the last s and entered cookie instead.

Matching can also be run in two modes:

• Normal mode - Match a full expression to an intent, which is best used when building a bot or a voice interface.
• Partial mode - Match most of the expression, for example when building an action launcher or a auto-complete for a search engine

Example

const ecolect = require('ecolect');
const en = require('ecolect/language/en');
const { any } = require('ecolect/values');
 
const intents = ecolect.intents(en)
  .intent('lights:on')
    .value('room', any())
    .add('turn lights on')
    .add('turn lights in {room} on')
    .done()
  .intent('lights:off')
    .value('room', any())
    .add('turn lights off')
    .add('turn lights in {room} off')
    .done()
  .build();
 
// Normal mode - match the best
intents.match('turn lights off')
  .then(results => {
    if(results.best) {
      // One of the expressions matched
      console.log('Intent:', results.best.intent);
      console.log('Values:', results.best.values)
 
      // results.matches will contain the top matches if anything else matched as well
    }
  });
 
intents.match('turn lights', { partial: true })
  .then(results => {
    results.matches.forEach(match => console.log(match));
  });

Options

Option	Default	Description
partial	false	If partial matching should be performed
now	new Date()	Date to use as a base for times and dates parsed
weekStartsOn	0 (Sunday)	The day the week starts on
firstWeekContainsDate	1	The day of January which is always in the first week of the year.

A note about weeks

It's important to set weekStartsOn and firstWeekContainsDate to something expected by the user. The default value for weekStartsOn is 0 which indicates that weeks start on Sunday.

firstWeekContainsDate defaults to 1 which is commonly used in North America and Islamic date systems. Countries that use this week numbering include Canada, United States, India, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, the Phillippines and most of Latin America.

For EU countries most of them use Mondays as the start of the week and the ISO week system. Settings weekStartsOn to 1 and firstWeekContainsDate to 4 will set weeks to a style used in EU and most other European countries, most of Acia and Oceania.

Middle Eastern countries commonly use Saturday as their first day of week and a week numbering system where the first week of the year contains January 1st. Set weekStartsOn to 6 and firstWeekContainsDate to 1 to use this style of week.

For more information about week numbering see the Week article on Wikipedia.

Values

Intents in Ecolect can also contain values, there are several built in types and it's easy to provide custom value validation. Values are used to capture information, such as dates, numbers, names and freeform text.

Values can either be used within intents or standalone as matchers:

const en = require('ecolect/language/en');
const { date } = require('ecolect/values');
 
// Create a matcher for the date value
const dateMatcher = date().matcher(en);
 
// Call the matcher
dateMatcher('2018')
  .then(value => /* do something with the value */)
  .catch(err => /* handle errors */);
 
// Optionally specify options for parsing, such as what day the week starts on
dateMatcher('start of week 12', { weekStartsOn: 1 /* Monday*/ })
  .then(value => /* do something with the value */)
  .catch(err => /* handle errors */);

Value types

Integer

Capture any positive integer number.

Language	Examples
English	20, zero, one million, 4 000, 1 dozen, 100k

Returned value

The returned value is a simple object with one key named value.

{ value: 2 }

Example

const { integer } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('list')
  .value('count', integer())
  .add('Show top {count} items')
  .done();

Number

Capture any number, including numbers with a fractional element.

Language	Examples
English	20, 2.4 million, 8.0, -12

Returned value

The returned value is a simple object with one key named value.

{ value: 2.4 }

Example

const { number } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('add')
  .value('amount', number())
  .add('Add {amount} to result')
  .done();

Ordinal

Capture an ordinal, such as 1st, indicating a position.

Language	Examples
English	1st, third, 3, the fifth

Returned value

The returned value is a simple object with one key named value.

{ value: 5 }

Example

const { ordinal } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('pick')
  .value('position', ordinal())
  .add('Show {position} in the list')
  .done();

Date

Capture a date representing a single day.

Language	Examples
English	today, in 2 days, january 12th, 2010-02-22, 02/22/2010, first friday in 2020

Returned value

The returned value is an object with the keys year, month, day and can be turned into a Date via the function toDate.

const date = value.toDate();

Example

const { date } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('deadline')
  .value('date', date())
  .add('Set deadline to {date}')
  .done();

Time

Capture a time of day.

Language	Examples
English	09:00, 3 pm, at 3:30 am, noon, quarter to twelve, in 2 hours, in 45 minutes

Returned value

The returned value is an object with the keys hour, minute, second and can be turned into a Date via the function toDate.

const date = value.toDate();

Example

const { time } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('alarm')
  .value('time', time())
  .add('Wake me {time}')
  .done();

Date & Time

Capture both a date and a time.

Language	Examples
English	3pm on Jan 12th, in 2 days and 2 hours, 14:00

const { dateTime } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('schedule')
  .value('when', dateTime())
  .add('Schedule a call {when}')
  .done();

Date Interval

Capture an interval between two dates.

Language	Examples
English	today, this month, February to March, 2018-01-01 to 2018-04-05, January 15th - 18th

Returned value

The returned value is an object with two dates in the start and end keys. Objects can be turned into dates with toStartDate() and toEndDate():

const start = value.toStartDate();
const end = value.toEndDate();

Example

const { dateInterval } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('add')
  .value('interval', dateInterval())
  .add('Todos with deadline within {dateInterval}')
  .done();

Date Duration

Capture a duration.

Language	Examples
English	2 days, 2m, 1d, 1 year and 2 days, 4y 2m, 1 week

Returned value

The returned value is an object containg fields with the change, such as years, weeks, months and days. The function toDate(currentTime) can be used to add the duration to a date.

// Add the duration to the current time
const fromNow = value.toDate();
 
// Add the duration to the specific date and time
const fromSpecific = value.toDate(new Date(2015, 0, 2));

Example

const { dateDuration } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('listPending')
  .value('dateDuration', dateDuration())
  .add('Show todos due to be completed in {dateDuration}')
  .done();

Time Duration

Capture a duration of hours, minutes, seconds and miliseconds.

Language	Examples
English	2 hours, 1s, 2h, 45m, 4 minutes and 10 seconds

Returned value

The returned value is an object containg fields with the change, such as hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. The function toDate(currentTime) can be used to add the duration to a date.

// Add the duration to the current time
const fromNow = value.toDate();
 
// Add the duration to the specific date and time
const fromSpecific = value.toDate(new Date(2015, 0, 2, 10, 0));

Example

const { timeDuration } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('timer')
  .value('timeDuration', timeDuration())
  .add('Set a timer for {timeDuration}')
  .done();

Date & Time Duration

Capture a duration of both days, hours, minutes, seconds and miliseconds.

Language	Examples
English	2 hours, 2 d 20 m, 4 weeks and 10 minutes

Returned value

The returned value is an object containg fields with the change, such as years, weeks, months and days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. The function toDate(currentTime) can be used to add the duration to a date.

// Add the duration to the current time
const fromNow = value.toDate();
 
// Add the duration to the specific date and time
const fromSpecific = value.toDate(new Date(2015, 0, 2, 10, 0));

Example

const { dateTimeDuration } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('timer')
  .value('dateTimeDuration', dateTimeDuration())
  .add('Set a timer for {dateTimeDuration}')
  .done();

Enumeration

Capture one of the specified values. Used to specify one or more values that should match.

const { enumeration } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('list')
  .value('type', enumeration([
    'Balloons',
    'Cookies',
    'Tasty Cake'
  ]))
  .add('Show me the last {type}')
  .done();

Text

Text can be captured with the type any. You can use any for things such as search queries, todo items and calendar events. Values of type any will always try to capture as much as they can and will not validate the result.

const { any } = require('ecolect/values');
 
builder.intent('echo')
  .value('text', any())
  .add('Echo {text}')
  .done();