What is NLP in Sequel?

NLP (Natural Language Processing) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction.

See. I can use Wikipedia! :-P

Basically, what it means for us is having the ability to let our reader/player type in whatever they want, and we respond to it smartly. I.e. the player is not being held to choosing from a few pre-made button responses.

To do this really neato stuff, we will be using Keywords. Keywords are words that pretty much cover the ideas you're expecting the reader/player to give you as their input.

For instance, you ask the player a question like: "Did you brush your teeth recently?" You'd probably expect the player to respond with a "Yes" or "No." These would be two good Keywords. The "Yes" or "No" answers would then flow down to their respective responses, like "Yes" might then go to "Good job!" and "No" might go to "OMG you must be joking!"

Now, not everyone might respond with a simple "Yes" or "No." There's "Yup, yeah, Nope, Nada, never, Can't, not gonna do it, sometimes, If I feel like it, Only on Sunday," etc, etc etc. It's basically open season on possibilities. Yikes.

So how do we deal with all the possibilities? Well, first off, our Keywords are pretty darn smart (or at least the underlying engineering magic is.) We'll already know that "Yes" is synonymous with words like "Yup" "Yeah." "affirmative" and "OK." Bottom line is, you don't need to fill a Keyword node with a ton of Keywords for every possible word that might be the same as "Yes."

In the following FAQs, we'll take a closer look at how the NLP Player decision nodes work in detail.