deepfates commented 2 years ago

A bot with a thesaurus!

We want to be able to easily define synonyms for the various commands within bots: "hi" for "hello", "picture" for "imagine", etc.

I pulled the relevant logic out of https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/forest/pull/127 and put it into SynonymBot class, using the powerful aPersistDict for stateful storage of synonyms.

Devs can still add lists of synonyms to methods in development, but now admins and users can adjust the bot's vocabulary directly in Signal. The interface is roughly based on the syntax of ln in the command line, like so:

link hello wazzup

SynonymBot has commands for linking, unlinking, listing synonyms, and more. It also has dialogue branches for various error states.

Still wondering:

Design/abstraction

Should this be integrated lower, into core?
Or should it inherit from a higher level bot?
- Features from QuestionBot might make error handling more natural

Technical hurdles

Mypy doesn't support adding attributes to functions. Currently just bypassing this with type: ignore but it seems to be an open issue in the community. Several hacky solutions are listed at https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/2087
Checks are failing due to unrelated files? (raised issue at https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/forest/issues/133)
The backend for aPersistDict is kind of tricky and undocumented (notes at https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/forest/issues/125#issuecomment-1047291669)

NLP questions

Some commands are restricted to admin, but currently link and unlink are available to users. This opens possibilities for abuse.
- Should they also be admin-only?
- Or have a restricted-words list, like berduck and bouncebot?
Unclear how synonyms will interact with fuzzy matching from string_dist
Currently devs can add the same synonym to two different commands. The first one alphabetically gets priority, i think. Users will be rebuffed from doing this though. (see sample dialogue below)

Happy to accept feedback on any of the above, or anything I missed.

Sample dialogue

technillogue commented 2 years ago

maybe a decorator, like requires_admin / hide? at least fewer # type: hides

in the link it looks like a protocol might be the way to go, or a Command class that inherits from Callable but has more attributes....

mobfriend issue should be fixed, run pip install --upgrade prometheus_client prometheus_async locally; they added type hints in a new release

deepfates commented 2 years ago

Okay @technillogue , I pulled your fix from main (thx!) and then updated to a decorator and protocol. This fixes most of the issues with mypy, except for adding synonyms to an inherited method, because the signatures no longer match. Don't know how common this use case is though? Definitely reduced the amount of #type: ignore although not total LOC

itdaniher commented 2 years ago

this is so exciting.