Jose Miguel and I discussed the date syntax offline a bit. We'll need to find a way to fold in some of his ideas without breaking the basic functionality (e.g. ambiguity of "from Monday" being interpreted as Duedate = Monday.

I have added a couple of lines more as the function was not yet properly processing defined resources if between brackets, e.g. it worked well for "Call John" -> "R: John Smith@" but not for "[Call John]"-> "R: John@".

The code is the following (for sure there is a be a better way to do it):

Case "resourceverbs"
remaining=Replace(LcaseActiveTopicText,LCase(KeywordTopic.Text) & " ","")
-> If matchbracket Then
-> remaining=Replace(remaining,"[","")
-> remaining=Replace(remaining,"]","")
-> End If
found=False
…

Regarding the date syntax, I have found the issue you mention with cases like "Monday". Maybe the workaround I am using results in a bit artificial English expressions, but it works.

I have three main topics about dates in mindreader.mmap: starting, duedates and leadtime

Expressions in "starting" always start with either "from" or "in", e.g. from Monday, in two weeks

Expressions in "duedates" always start with "by", e.g. by Monday, by end of week

Expressions in "leadtime" always start with "for", e.g. for two days, for three weeks

The changes I had to made to the code in mindreadernlp were minimum.

As for your other questions, I normally work on my corporate laptop, where everything including the OS in is English, so I got used to write in English all the time. It helps me improve my English skills and also to think faster in English.

Anyway, if there is something I can do, like translating some code or whatever else, I will be happy to help.

Regards.

I incoporated you upper case fix. I had noticed this as well but found that ResultsManager dealt with it OK so hadn't fixed it yet. I was trying to decide whether to just pass around the string in normal form or add a parameter to the function. This will work fine for now.

I fixed the 2nd bug related to brackets. The problem was that it was doing the assignment even if it didn't find a "1st word" resourceverb match (hence the blank entry).

It was set up to only do automatic resource extraction if the resourceverb is at the beginning of the sentence. The risk of false positives is too high if it looks for them throughout the string.

For example:
"Buy contact lenses" -> R="Lenses@"
"Return phone call" -> R=""
"Empty email box" -> R="Box@"
"Arrange discussion of project" -> R="Arrange@"

In order to enable the approach you in your examples, I changed the code so that will also do the generic match if the resourceverb falls right after a bracket:

"Return phone call [Call John]" -> R="John@"

I folded in the additional date delimiter you provided along with fixes above and uploaded to the wiki.

Your date syntax is pretty advanced and might be hard to fold into the current approach. Currently "Monday" leads to a due date of Monday. In your example "from Monday" is a start date right?

We could define a additional "AbsoluteStarting" branch that would set "from Monday" as a start date, but we'd need to have code be smart enough to not see the "Monday" portion of the string as a due date. Let's continue to discuss.

"Mark Task Complete" needs an overall and better syntax definition. Lets move on to that once MindReader stabilizes a bit.

Thanks for the interest and input. Have you used MindReader in Spanish at all?

I ahve to admint I feel a bit guilty that you are not dealing with your home intray properly but I have just noticed that the new code works great unless the verb is between [] and I am not able to fix it myself.

What happens is that expressions like "I owe Peter some money" correctly lead to: "R: Peter, %me%", while "[I owe Peter] some money" lead to: "R: , %me%".

I have also tried "Some money[I owe Peter]" with the same result.

Would it be possible to call the funtion RemoveBracketedText before calling the mindreadtopic one whitout losing content?

Any other idea?

Thanks again.

Great work! It is exactly what I unsuccessfully tried to get by my own. I specially like that you can enter resource names that are not pre-defined.

I have taken the freedom to add one line of code to the FirstWord function to convert the name of the resource to capital letters as "dad" seemed a bit ugly to me :-) :

FirstWord=UCase(Left(FirstWord,1)) & LCase(Mid(FirstWord, 2))

I also omitted the "starting" part of the code as I am using a customized version of both mindreader.mmap and mindreadernlp.mmbas. I did so because I wanted to deal with dates in multiple ways, e.g. setting deadline and leadtime.

Now they are able to deal with complex date expressions like "from Monday for three weeks", "in ten days same day" or "by end of week after next for three days".

You can also use either ·09/04· for starting date or #09/04# for due date (· is Shift+3 and # is AltGr+3 in the Spanish keyboard).

If you are interested in having a look at those modified versions just let me know the email address I should send them to and I will do it.

I have also modified the "mark task complete and log" with additional date functions I needed, e.g. "FirstWeekOfMonth". I can send it yo you as well if you wish.

Thanks again.

I also added the fabled "generic resource" recognition. Now "Talk to John Smith" will lead to "John@" if John Smith isn't in the resourcelist and "Waiting for Amazon" will lead to resource=Amazon.

This should enable MindReader to be more useful to folks right out of the box without any customization. I also added your additional "contact" verbs (e.g. inform) to the default set as they are nice additions.

Thanks for the nudge to get this off the someday/maybe list!

Once this is populated, the "resources" branch can be removed or trimmed down to shorthand keyword@ = resource@ entries (e.g. John@ = "John Smith@").

The first time the code is run it will create new "resourcelist" and "resourceverb" branches in mindreader.mmap. The "resourceverb" branch is populated with the typical items (contact, waiting for, etc). The notes communicate the type of relationship indicated (partner, waiting, owe).

The "resourcelist" branch is populated with three samples that you can build on.

The problem I ran into was deciding if the resource should be one or two words (e.g. "John" or "John Smith"). This impacts whether your search for 1st or 2nd space to terminate the resource string. Gyronix recommends full names, but I've always just used last or first.

We could get around this issue by searching a pre-defined set of resource strings (and sacrifice the ability to "discover" new resources):

If instr(teststr,"Contact") then
for each resource in resources 'need to line this up with right topic list
if instr(Replace(teststr,"Contact ","")), resource)=1 then
cat=cat & resource & "@,"
end if
next
end if

The resource needs to immediately follow the "leading verb" string or else you can get confusion when multiple resources are mentioned in a task. Maybe this is what threw me off last time.

The code above seems like it will work. I'm not sure why I didn't do that the first time around. One of the appeals of MindReader is does its job in only 100 lines of code and has good language independence.

Have you been using "mra" to add resources? I just run mra, cancel past the file and verb prompts and then enter the resource keyword and keyword and it builds all the required strings. I don't manually go into mindreader.mmap much at all, so that reduced the driver to improve things.

I'll take a shot at integrated the code above, but it might be a few weeks if I don't get to it today. Today's "weekly" review show me a pretty hot and aging dashboard!

My "resources" topic within Mindreader.mmap is growing fast and it is difficult to manage already.

I have added many verbs for my main contact people (e.g. Ask X, Talk to X about, Update X on, Discuss with X, Call X, E-mail X, Remind X about, Inform X about and so on). It is really a huge time saving as I can use "natural" expressions for my actions.

However I have realized that most of these "extra" verbs actually point to the same "X@" result, so I have thought about updating the MindReaderNLP to be "smarter" and allow having a "lighter" resources topic in MR.

What I have in mind is something like:

If X identified as Resource look for one of the following additional expressions:
If is one of these {call,update,talk to,remind..} Then Owner=X@
If is "waiting for" Then Owner=X
If is "I owe" Then Owner=X;%me%

Does it make sense?

I would apply the same approach for the Icons, as I use the same one for several verbs and the list is also growing fast.

Unfortunatelly my programming knowledge is quite limited so any suggestions about how to implement this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

José Miguel

http://www.activityowner.com/2007/05/26/mindreader-7/

This is only covered in the demo video, which exercises most of the syntax features

http://www.activityowner.com/2007/02/24/gyroq-mindreader-video-clip/

and on the "syntax" map

http://wiki.activityowner.com/index.php?title=MindReader_Syntax

I am finding that even heavy users are missing some of the major "features". I am hoping the wiki provides a framework to improve on that situation.

In terms of your second question, there is a key syntax trick you need to incorporate. Any text inside of [brackets] is removed from from the final activity text. This gives you the option of having it included if desired. For example, instead of

"ibmmarket send email to john doe next week re basketball game"

you could say

email John Doe re:basketball game [ibmmarket next week!]

Another question, though. After configuring the mindreader.mmap file with a bunch of my maps and then using the q tag to enter a whole bunch of stuff, although everything worked and was placed into the correct map on a "send queue", they key word I set up for each map was included (I assume by design) in each activity description. I assumed it wouldn't work that way, and unless I'm missing something, this doesn't really seem to make sense to me.

For example, an entry in GyroQ might be "ibmarket send email to John doe next week re basketball game", where ibmarket is the keyword for an Investment Bankers Marketing Plan Map. The entry is sent to the correct map and parsed perfectly, except the entry starts with "ibmarket". I would have thought that map keyword itself would not be included in the activity description. I can't really come up with any keyword descriptions for my maps that I would consistently want included in all activities sent to the maps.

Thoughts?

So what was your experience exactly? You were getting the comobject error, but then restarting, and subsequently mri and everything else worked? I don't recommend 1.9.2 as the packed text for these

GyroQ doesn't have the ability to error trap the way macro code does, so it is hard to track down the cause of this error. I've seen it reported a few times. What I usually recommend to folks is to download the sample mindreader.mmap and configure that. The solution would be to someday/maybe rewrite mri in macro code.

Looks like this should go to the top of the FAQ list:

http://wiki.activityowner.com/index.php?title=MindReader_FAQ

"Having some trouble… I'm running MindManager 6.2.399 and GyroQ 1.9.2
I've added the packed text for the MindReader "o","q","c","mri", "mra", and "s" Tags into GyroQ dialog box. (success) I've downloaded the two macros into my My Maps folder. When I run mri, it tells me that it's going to create the mri map, goes to MindManager to do so, then creates the central topic, but then stops and throws an error: "Object 'CmjDocumentCollectionComObject' reports an error: 'unable to create document'. Then the central topic gets wiped out and I don't have a mindreader.mmap file anywhere. I have no idea where to start to try to debug this…

The GyroQ taskbar had somehow died. So when I restarted it and enabled extended tabs it all started to work. I think I'm set now."

In the meantime, you can download a basic mindreader.mmap file to put in your "my maps" directory from here:

http://wiki.activityowner.com/index.php?title=MindReader_Configuration_Map

This should allow you to get started using the tags. The mri tag is just a way of automatically configuring this file to your liking. You can augment the basic mindreader.mmap file using the "mra" tag.