The Options Page

Corby Home page

This is the options page of the Operation Manual for the Corby application. The other pages of the manual are:

Main page – This is the main page of the Operation Manual.

Using Corby – Describes the usual operation procedures.

Learning– Explains how Corby learns.

Resources – Explains how to best use your computing resources.

Knowledge base – Describes back-up, restore and recovery procedures.

This page includes the following sections:

Overview

The General Options dialog box

The Advanced Options dialog box

The .INI file

Overview

This page describes the options that control application behaviour. These are separated into two groups. One of them, called General Options, describes the options that are commonly used.

The second group, called Advanced Options, describes the options that are seldom changed and that require some knowledge of the inner workings of the application to use them effectively.

The General Options dialog box

This is the General Options dialog box. At the top of the window there is the “Text file mode" group of radio buttons, which include:

Chained

The paragraphs in a text file submitted for learning are related in a way such that one can be considered a stimulus and the one that immediately follows it is the appropriate response to that stimulus.

Independent

The paragraphs in a text file submitted for learning are not related to each other.

Channel specific

This is not used in the current version of the software.

Immediately below the “Text file mode" controls, there is the "Text file parameters" group of controls, which include:

Paragraph delimiter is 2 line terminators

This parameter means that a sequence of two or more line terminators separates paragraphs in a text file submitted for learning.

Filter out single line terminators

This parameter means that single line terminators that appear in a text file submitted for learning are replaced by a space.

Delete extra spaces

When this parameter is set, a sequence of two or more spaces is replaced by a single space. Also spaces at the beginning and end of a paragraph are ignored.

Parse URLs

If this parameter is set, Corby will parse Internet addresses in text files, then transform them into properly formatted URLs and display them as such in the Log Window.

At the bottom of the window there is the "Working folder" group of controls. Which include an edit box and the Browse button. In the edit box appears the current working folder for the Corby application. This is where the knowledge base files are. To change this you can edit the new folder directly in the edit control or you can use the Browse button. This button opens a dialog box where you can choose the new folder. The change of the working folder only takes effect in the next time you run the application. You may find it more convenient to change this parameter in the .INI file, as explained below.

The remaining parameters in this dialog box are:

Maximum cache size (% of main memory)

This sets the cache size, expressed as a percentage of total system physical memory.

Maximum size of the Knowledge Base

This parameter specifies the maximum size of the knowledge base, expressed in Mbytes.

Maximum size of learning queue

This parameter sets the maximum size of the learning queue.

Maximum size of the log file

This sets the maximum size of the log file. This corresponds to the characters that appear in the Log Window, the upper pane of the main window.

Process auto-learning

When this parameter is set, everything that appears in the Log Window will be automatically submitted for learning.

Enable Bootstrap

This parameter, when on, enables Corby to generate bootstrap topics when the conversation reaches a dead end.

The buttons in this dialog box are used as follows:

Defaults

This will set all the parameters to their default values.

Cancel

This will close the dialog box and discard any changes you made.

When you click this button, the program will check the value of all the parameters. If one of them is out of range you will get an error message and the parameter will be reset to its previous value. If everything is correct, Corby will save the parameters both to its internal equivalents and to the .INI file (see below), and then close the dialog box.

The Advanced Options dialog box

This is the Advanced Options dialog box. The parameters it contains are:

Learning context depth

This parameter defines the size of the learning context, that is, the number of paragraphs before the current one that Corby keeps for learning purposes.

Memory depth control

This parameter controls how many links each knowledge element maintains with other elements in the knowledge base.

Learning depth control

This parameter controls how deeply Corby will look for correlations between a response and elements of the learning context.

Maximum time for an interactive response

The maximum time, expresses in seconds, that Corby spends looking for a response is determined by this parameter.

Maximum time for a batch response

This is the equivalent of the "Maximum time for an interactive response" parameter but now for writing files.

The buttons in this dialog box are used as follows:

Defaults

This will set all the parameters to their default values.

Cancel

This will close the dialog box and discard any changes you made.

The .INI file

All the parameters described above are kept in a standard Windows initialisation file (.INI). This one is called CORBY.INI and is located in the same folder as the application executable.

If you are comfortable with this sort of thing, you can edit this file directly to change some parameter, provided that the application is not running at the moment. You can use any non-formatting editor for that, for instance Notepad. You should pay attention not to change the format of each line; you should be especially careful in not using spaces around the “=” in each line.

When the Corby application starts, it will read the .INI file, parse its contents and set the internal parameters to the values specified in the file. If one or more parameters are missing in the file, they will be set to their default values. Also, if one parameter in the file has an out of range value, it will be silently set to its default value.

Feedback

Comments and suggestions about this page are welcome and should be sent to fadevelop@clix.pt

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