aidalib 0.2

Aida is a language agnostic library for text generation.

Aida Lib

Aida is a language agnostic library for text generation.

Usage

A simple hello world script would look like this:

from aida import render, Empty, Var

# create a variable to hold a name
name_var = Var('name')

# create a simple phrase
node = (Empty + 'hello,' | name_var).to_phrase()

# assign a value to the variable
name_var.assign('World')

# render the node
print(render(node))  # 'Hello, World.'

Install

Download and install with pip:

pip install aidalib

Core Concepts

When using Aida, first you compose a tree of operations on your text that include conditions via branches and other control flow. Later, you fill the tree with data and render the text.

A building block is the variable class: Var. Use it to represent a value that you want to control later. A variable can hold numbers (e.g. float, int) or strings.

You can create branches and complex logic with Branch. In the example below, if x is greater than 1, it will render many, otherwise single.

x = Var('x')
Branch(x > 1, 'many', 'single')

Context

The context, represented by the class Ctx, is useful to create rules that depends on what has been written before. Each object or literal that is passed to Aida is remembered by the context.

name = Const('Bob')
alt_name = Const('He')
bob = Branch(~name.in_ctx(), name, alt_name)
ctx = Ctx()

render(bob | 'is a cool guy.' | bob | 'doesn\'t mind.', ctx)
# Bob is a cool guy. He doesn't mind.

Creating a reference expression is a common use-case, so we have a helper function called create_ref.

bob = create_ref('Bob', 'He')

Operators

You can compose operations on your text with some handy operators.

Concatenation (+ and |)

'the' | 'quick' | 'brown' | 'fox'  # 'the quick brown fox'

'the' + 'quick' + 'brown' + 'fox'  # 'thequickbrownfox'

Check context (in_ctx)

Check if the current node is in the context.

Const('something').in_ctx()

Create a sentence (sentence)

Formats a line into a sentence, capitalizing the first word and adding a period.

Const('hello world').sentence()  # 'Hello world.'

Logical and numeric operators

operator	example
negation	!x
greater than	x > y
greater or equal than	x >= y
less than	x < y
less or equal than	x <= y
equal	x == y
not equal	x != y
or	`x
and	x & y
plus	x + y

Random choice

Randomly draws one node from a list of possibilities.

Choice('Alice', 'Bob', 'Chris')  # either 'Alice', 'Bob', or 'Chris'

Injector

The Injector class assigns values to variables from a list each time it is rendered. Very useful to automatically fill values based on data.

animal = Var('animal')
sound = Var('sound')
node = animal | 'makes' | sound
node = Injector([animal, sound], node)

# assign multiple values
node.assign([
  {'animal': 'cat', 'sound': 'meaw'},
  {'animal': 'dog', 'sound': 'roof'},
])

render(node) # 'cat makes meaw'

render(node) # 'dog makes roof'

For-loops with Repeat

Use Repeat to render a node multiple times. At the simplest level, you have this:

render(Repeat('buffalo').assign(8))
# 'buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo'

Repeat is very useful when used with Injector, like this:

animal = Var('animal')
sound = Var('sound')
node = animal | 'makes' | sound
node = Injector([animal, sound], node)
repeat = Repeat(node)

# assign multiple values
data = [
  {'animal': 'cat', 'sound': 'meaw'},
  {'animal': 'dog', 'sound': 'roof'},
]
node.assign(data)
repeat.assign(len(data))

# renders text based on data
render(node)  # cat makes meaw dog makes roof

Language Concepts

There are some experimental features that allows you to create text that adapts to common language features, like grammatical number and person.

Enumerate items

Use LangConfig to setup language features and then call create_enumeration().

from aida import create_enumeration, LangConfig, Lang, render

render(create_enumeration(LangConfig(lang=Lang.ENGLISH), 'Alice', 'Bob', 'Chris'))
# 'Alice, Bob, and Chris'

render(create_enumeration(LangConfig(lang=Lang.PORTUGUESE), 'Alice', 'Bob', 'Chris'))
# 'Alice, Bob e Chris'

Sentence Structure

You can compose sentences using special structures: NP (noun phrase) and VP (verb phrase) along with LangConfig.

from aida import NP, VP, LangConfig

subj = NP('the dog')
verb = VP('barked')

s = (subj | verb).sentence()

render(LangConfig(s))  # The dog barked.

What really makes this different from just using Const is that we can create rules that change the output of NP and VP based on various language features. The system will try to use the rule that matches most features from the given LangConfig.

from aida import NP, VP, LangConfig, GNumber, GPerson

subj = (NP('I')
        .add_mapping('I', GNumber.SINGULAR, GPerson.FIRST)
        .add_mapping('he', GNumber.SINGULAR, GPerson.THIRD))
        .add_mapping('we', GNumber.PLURAL, GPerson.FIRST))
verb = (VP('drive')
        .add_mapping('drive', GPerson.FIRST)
        .add_mapping('drives', GPerson.THIRD))

s = (subj | verb | 'a nice car').sentence()

render(LangConfig(s, number=GNumber.SINGULAR, person=GPerson.FIRST))  # I drive a nice car.
render(LangConfig(s, number=GNumber.SINGULAR, person=GPerson.THIRD))  # He drives a nice car.
render(LangConfig(s, number=GNumber.PLURAL, person=GPerson.FIRST))  # We drive a nice car.