Combinator Documentation

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to help users and contributors easily see the combinators for English that currently exist in Drasil and are available for use. This will also help to keep all of the different combinators organized and to separate them by their English meanings. As brought up in issue #2399, we are trying to encapsulate the knowledge associated with common English combinators as a means to generalize Drasil's language while making readability of the code clearer. So far, we have separated these combinators into four levels:

• Level 1: Sentence level. These combinators can only be used to join two Sentences, and they do not hold any semantic meaning usable by Drasil. In other words, they are only surface level combinators and are unable to produce a sophisticated idea from two simpler ideas. When joining concepts, these should only be used when the relationship between the phrases is unable to be expressed with any higher-level combinators.
• Level 2: NounPhrase level. The combinators listed here are better than Sentence-level combinators as they can hold information about pluralization and capitalization rules. As a result, Drasil can utilize these combinators in more powerful ways because it can know the rules that govern how an applied Sentence should look. Because of the nature of the NP type (having the ability to hold knowledge of singular, plural, capital, and title cases), these combinators can easily replace many Sentence-level combinators and give Drasil more knowledge when recording information.
• Level 3: NamedIdea or conceptual level. These combinators are similar to the NounPhrase combinators, except they are able to hold the semantic meaning of the combinator. These represent a new idea that is built upon multiple simpler ideas, allowing Drasil to grow its knowledge of such ideas. The combinators at this level are ideal and practical for use in Drasil, but they are more difficult to implement. One must be able to see the underlying patterns that are within English, and then apply them using these combinators. For example, something like the ofThe combinator will allow us to contain the knowledge that the first idea is a unique attribute of the second idea.
• Level 4: Things above NamedIdeas that are amenable to joining. This is ideal and something to aim for, but a little too early to start incorporating consistently.

Naming

The setup for naming combinators is as follows:

• An underscore (_) is used when a combinator name would otherwise clash with either Haskell's syntax or any other similarly named functions. Common uses include of_, a_, and_, etc. The only exceptions to this rule are the following combinators - the_ofThe, the_ofGive, and the_isExpctToHvC, which are named so because they append the word "the" in front of the first term.
• An appended C denotes that the first word is capitalized (for Sentence types).
• An appended Gen denotes the general (or custom) case for a combinator. It often takes functions which can specify the creation of singular, plural, or title cases.
• An appended T denotes combinators that are either capitalized (for Sentence types) or have some special attribute defined by the following letters in the function definition (for NP and NamedIdea types).
• An appended TT denotes that the combinator is meant for use in titles (commonly used in making titles for Sentence types).
• Two appended Ps or Ss often denote the formation of a plural case (commonly used for NP and NamedIdea types).
• Four appended Ps or Ss denote the formation of the singular and plural cases with the first two letters for the singular case and the last two letters for the plural case (commonly used for NP and NamedIdea types).

Sentence-level Combinators

Many of these combinators act like inserting words into the middle of an English sentence (unless noted otherwise). Please see the Haddock documentation for more details on each combinator. (Subject to change: prepending s to combinator names)

Combinators with "the":

• andThe
• fromThe
• inThe
• isThe
• toThe
• ofThe
• the_ofThe (combines two Sentences with "of the" and prepends "the" to them)
• the_ofThe' (combines two Sentences with "of the" and prepends capitalized "The" to them)

Common combinators (without "the"):

• sOf
• sOfA
• sOr
• sAnd
• sAre
• sIn
• sIs
• sFor
• andIts

Uncommon combinators:

• isExpctToHv (prepends "the" before combining with "is expected to have")
• ofGiv (prepends "the" before combining with "of a given")
• ofGiv' (prepends capitalized "The" before combining with "of a given")
• sVersus
• denotes (inserts "denotes the")
• wrt (inserts "with respect to")
• defnAs (inserts "defined as")

Unusual combinators:

• sFor' (titleizes and combines two NamedIdeas into a Sentence using "for")
• sFor'' (titleizes and takes two functions to apply to NamedIdeas before combining into a Sentence using "for")
• forTT (titleizes and pluralizes first NamedIdea before combining into a Sentence using "for")
• forTT' (titleizes and pluralizes both NamedIdeas before combining into a Sentence using "for")

NounPhrase-level Combinators

These combinators have many variations, as pluralization and capitalization rules may vary greatly between different use cases. Please see the Haddock documentation for more details and the specifics of each combinator. (Subject to change: Naming convention appending NP to the end of the combinator name)

Generalized combinators (mostly used as helpers for other combinators but can still be used for a custom combinator):

• insertStringNP (inserts a given String into two NPs. Plural case pluralizes second term.)
• insertSentNP (inserts a given Sentence into two NPs. Plural case pluralizes second term.)
• prependStringNP (prepends a given String to a NP)
• prependSentNP (prepends a given Sentenceto aNP`)

Article combinators (the, a):

• theNP
• theNP' (accepts a function to determine plural case)
• aNP
• aNP' (accepts a function to determine plural case)

Common combinators (appending a ' means plural case pluralizes first term. Appending '' means plural case accepts two functions.):

• ofTheNP
• inTheNP
• the_ofTheNP
• forNP
• ofNP
• andNP

Unusual combinators:

• withNP (no ' or '' case)
• ofNP (has a ''' case that takes two functions for singular case and two for plural case)
• andNP (has a ''' case that takes two functions for singular case and two for plural case)

Concept-level Combinators

These combinators take NamedIdeas and make a NP from them. Because of the variety of pluralization and capitalization, there are many variants of each combinator. Please visit the Haddock documentation for more details and the specifics of each combinator. (Subject to change: Naming scheme with ' and _)

Common combinators:

• and_
• and_'
• andRT
• for
• for'
• of_
• of_'
• of_''
• of__
• ofN_
• ofA
• ofA'
• the
• the'
• the''
• inThe'
• with
• ofThe'
• the_ofThe''

Higher-level combinators

Please see Haddock documentation for more information.

NamedIdea and NamedChunk combinators (does not preserve abbreviations):

• compoundNC
• compoundNC'
• compoundNC''
• compoundNC'''
• compoundNCPl
• compoundNCPlPh

Notes

Future changes include:

• Removing s,NP naming convention and allowing qualified imports to determine the different levels of combinators.
• Change method for naming different Singular and Plural operators as follows:
  • _ used for combinators that would otherwise clash with Haskell syntax
  • Base combinators will default plural case to singular t1, plural t2
  • append S and P to specify the plural case
  • append T to specify title case
  • append Gen for general case (no specified plural case)