Just a simple experiement:

u: (have diet) any response

In fact, any pattern with the word ‘diet’ will do. Could anybody please try it and let me know whether the pattern generates a response? Thank you.

It will, if it is in a topic that can be discovered by the control script.

Bruce Wilcox - Sep 7, 2018:

It will, if it is in a topic that can be discovered by the control script.

Thanks Bruce, but the rule is already in a topic called ~eating_generic with topicflags keep and repeat. The only keyword for the topic was ~food and I had assumed ~food would be enough for diet but it wasn’t. Adding the concept ~diet worked for the rule I posted.

However I made a different rule and it’s still acting the same way. I was having the same problem with the words vegan or vegetarian, but putting them in a custom concept(~veggie) solved that issue. Here is the topic file as is:

concept: ~veggie [vegan vegetarian veggie]
concept: ~dt [diet food_plan]
TOPIC: ~eating_generic keep repeat (~food ~diet ~dt diet)

u: (gimme diet) Hungry!

u: DESC (what be _~nounlist) refine()
# a: (food ^incontext(FAVFOOD)) its a food i love
# a: (diet ^incontext(EATHEALTH)) it keeps me slim
a: (pizza) italian food
a: (food) something i eat
a: (diet) a fasting methods

Here are the volleys:

Anoop:  I don’t know what to say.
matt: > what be diet
Anoop:  I don’t know what to say.
matt: > what be food
Anoop:  Something i eat
matt: > what be pizza
Anoop:  Italian food
matt: > what be diet
Anoop:  I don’t know what to say.
matt: > gimme diet
Anoop:  Hungry!
matt: >

The Quibble files are not part of the bot anymore and the quibble rules have been commented in the control file. The only TOP files are simplecontrol.top and eating.top. I am using :build anoop 0 and :reset user before typing anything. I also tried deleting the relevant log files. I a, using the 8.2 version of Chatscript. I have minimized the code as much as possible and still the diet part of the pattern is not recognized. Please help..

~food is a list of foods.  :down ~food 100 will display the list.

~nounlist is a list of concept-classified nouns. It is not the same as all nouns in the dictionary.
use ~noun

:prepare what is diet would reveal no detection of ~nounlist

However ~nounlist has a fixed list of members. ~noun depends on successful pos-tagging of a sentence.

When something doesnt work, the FIRST debugging step is to use :prepare on your input, to see whether it is what you think it is (has not been corrected by CS in some way) and what concepts it triggers.

there are two kinds of concepts: bounded (enumerated) and unbounded (engine defined). Bounded ones are defined by what’s in build 0 RAWDATA—and sometimes in LIVEDATA and what you define in :build of your bot. if you use :down on them.  Unbounded ones do not do :down because one does not list the contents in advance, only by the engine preparing them.  ~number is unbounded, all pos-tags and sentence roles are unbounded.