natural-script

Natural-script is a script language to easily parse english expressions. It also includes a node.js implementation of a parser.

When you write a bot (slack bot, messenger bot, etc) you have to parse user inputs, classify it and extract information you need. It is easy to classify simple user sentences like hello, How are you?, What time is it in London ?. But it is quite harder when you want to extract complex information. Try for example to parse the date from the expression my appointment is planned for tomorrow at 2pm at home.

You could use Natural Language Processing but sometimes it is a bit overkill. Besides sometimes you expect very specific commands and NLP may be as strict as expected.

With natural-script, describe the request you expect with a simplified expression based on english words. These are some examples of natural-script language :

Hello
~hello
how are you
my email is {email}
go to {url:var1}

Getting started

For now, this project is only available for node.js because it uses natural.

# with npm
$ npm install natural-script

# with yarn
$ yarn add natural-script

import { parse } from 'natural-script'
(async () => {
  // parse returns a promise
  // await parse(<user input>, <pattern to match>)

  // by default parse accepts only strict equal strings
  (await parse('Hello', 'hello')) === false

  // ~ accepts similar words
  (await parse('Hello', '~hello')) === true
  (await parse('Hello', '~helo')) === true
  (await parse('Bonjour', '~hello')) === false

  // detects words and returns them
  (await parse('hello thibault', 'hello {word}')) === true
  (await parse('hello thibault', 'hello {word:name}')) === { name: 'foo' }

  // detects emails and returns them
  (await parse('my email is [e-mail]', 'my email is {email}')) === true
  (await parse('my email is [e-mail]', 'my email is {email:foo}')) === { foo: '[e-mail]' }

  // detects urls and returns them
  (await parse('go to http://foo.com', 'go to {url}')) === true
  (await parse('go to http://foo.com', 'go to {url:bar}')) === { bar: 'http://foo.com' }
})()

Contribution

This project is only at the beginning so do not hesitate to contribute or propose improvements. Please follow guidelines.

License

This project is distributed on MIT license.