More Fun with Language

[maradydd]

I've spent a little time today amusing myself with Subservient Chicken, which some of you have posted about before. Rather than sending him silly or smutty commands, though, I'm stress-testing their parser by submitting things I think will be too obscure, just to see what happens.

So far, "flense a whale" has been the only one that got no response whatsoever. "Translate the Bible into Hindi" seemed to key onto either "Bible" or "Hindi", as the chicken got down on its knees and appeared to face Mecca and prostrate itself. Which, uh, has not much to do with the Bible or Hinduism, but the chicken's supposed to be subservient, not smart.

Have you given the Chicken any commands that were too out-there for it to comprehend? What were they?

No, really, I actually do wonder what sort of NL tech they've got going on the backend. It can't possibly just be a huge list of strings mapped to various AVIs. They're probably doing some kind of fuzzy matching, but I sure would like to know details.

Comments

[madbard.livejournal.com]

I think I saw a complete list of commands that the Chicken responds to. It doens't have much of a parser per se - just a series of keyword tuplets mapped to certain responses.