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Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

duckling-lib.org

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Re: Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

#41

Post by ar7hur »

trab wrote: post #38

I have been frantically researching for a temporal tagging library that can be used on an Android application with no good results. I have looked at SUTime, HeidelTime, natty and some others. I am trying to parse (among others) expressions of the type "the first week of the previous month", "The last week of September". The only library that can parse this type of query is SUTime. Can you comment on why you implement…

SUTime is very good, like all the StanfordNLP stuff. We chose to do Duckling because:

- To my knowledge SUTime only supports English

- We wanted something that's easy to extend. SUTime is somewhat hard to extend, especially if you are not into Java

- We needed not just temporal expressions, but also monetary data, temperatures, quantities...

That being said, Duckling is still young and certainly not as proven as SUTime yet.

Re: Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

#44

Post by blandinw »

Arnavion wrote: post #23
ominous wrote: post #18

Nice tool! Feedback: I shared it to a friend and his reaction was "bah, it doesn't even work with the example suggested". Meaning, he saw the placeholder and pressed enter.

Yes, the placeholder is misleading in that it looks like it's been entered into the textbox already and I only need to click "Try me!", but actually I need to type it out first. It could at least detect that the input is empty instead of saying it failed to parse the input!

Fixed, thanks!

Re: Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

#45

Post by Arnavion »

samdb wrote: post #35
munificent wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, I don't know what a fortnight is either!

From 'fourteen nights' - two weeks

Another reason to know what fortnight means is that it enables you to use the word "fortnightly" instead of "bi-weekly." With the latter I never know if the speaker meant "twice a week" or "every two weeks" without a follow-up question.

Re: Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

#46

Post by hardwaresofton »

This project looks great. I think it's a great example of finding one thing to do well, and doing it well (though of course, there are the other competitors you will have to catch up to, like SUTime, etc).

I also like that this project was attempted by the layman (no offense intended). I feel that a lot of academic projects have this "if you haven't been studying ngrams for 20 years don't bother" feel to them, and people don't seek to deeply understand, instead of just handwaving "somebody smart thought of this". That kind of thinking reduces new thought in a given field.

Will be using the library in my personal projects for sure, extra points for using Clojure (in my book), as I've been recently learning about it and getting into it.

Re: Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

#48

Post by AbsoluteDestiny »

ar7hur wrote: post #27
teh_klev wrote: post #26

Unfortunately it doesn't parse a Scottish colloquial expression such as "the next again day at 4pm". Which means in two days time at 4pm :)

I'm very excited about supporting Scottish colloquial expressions! Working on it now, thanks :)

Colloquialisms will pose tricky when they conflict. For example, "3pm next friday" is deciphered by duckling as Friday, 3 October 2014 at 15:00:00 +0000 (UTC) which would not be correct if talking colloquially where I grew up as "next" means not this one but the one after or, more generally, "the one next week not the one this week".

This is probably not the case everywhere, which is why duckling uses next and this interchangeably.

Re: Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

#50

Post by Thrymr »

Looking forward to time zones support in something like this. Parsing phrases like "4 o'clock tomorrow my time" or "8am on the East Coast" would be useful. Few libraries that try to guess time zones do this well (they just assume you mean whatever your device is localized to at best).
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