Joel Stevick

Chapter 4 · section 5 of 7

What words cannot do

Three questions the deployed pipeline met, each a thing word matching cannot fix:

  • Can I leave my car right next to a fireplug? The learner’s word for the thing is not the law’s. Fireplug contains fire, so spelledAs gives it a weak score against every law that mentions fire, and the hydrant law is one of many, outside the eight. The deployed source’s comment on the question says the two share no word.
  • ¿A qué distancia de un hidrante puedo estacionar? Nothing. The test above is the measurement.
  • What is the highest posted speed limit? Texas’s maximum-speed laws say “maximum speed limit”, and the laws that say “posted speed limit” are the golf-cart and scooter rules, which contain the question’s words and do not answer it. On Texas’s file as published, by the question’s words, the 70 mph law ranked 124th and the 85 mph law 44th.

The first two are the same failure: a question whose meaning matches a law whose words do not. Chapter 5 finds laws by meaning. The third is different, and more common than it looks: the question’s words match the wrong laws well. Chapter 6 has a model restate the question in the words the code uses.