MCS-177 Project: Movie Query System

Recommended preparation and schedule

Problem

In this project, you will finish a program that uses a natural language interface with a database of movies by working through section 7.6 of the text. There are two major parts to this project. One is to write the procedures you need to search through the database. The second is to finish the implementation of the natural language interface.

For this project, you will work in groups of two.

Remember that working in a group of two does not necessarily mean that your work load will be halved. Be sure that each partner contributes and that neither partner monopolizes the process. We encourage you to meet with your lab instructor on the second lab day to assess how the project is going and, if need be, to come up with strategies for more successfully working together.

Project Report

You should simply turn in a DrScheme printout that shows your procedures and the tests you did. Be sure to group your work into logically related sections and put a descriptive heading at the beginning of each section. Your audience for this report consists of people already familiar with this assignment.

To get some sense of how this project report will be graded, look at the grading sheet that we use.

Computer Exercises

You are required to do exercises 7.22-7.32 (except for exercise 7.28) for the project, and you may additionally do as many of exercises 7.33-7.38 as you have time and interest. You should probably do exercise 7.34 before exercise 7.35, but otherwise the optional exercises are independent of one another, so you can generally do any of them without having done the preceding ones.

Following is a breakdown of the exercises into related groups:

Save the following file to somewhere in your directory:
```
~max/www-docs/concabs/code/movie.scm
```
and then evaluate everything in it. This file contains the main procedures for the movie query system from section 7.6, commented and organized for your ease of understanding.
Work on exercises 7.22-7.24 on pages 189-190 during the first lab day. These exercises will give you practice manipulating lists using filter and map. You do not yet have to work with the movie query system.
Next do exercises 7.25-7.27 on pages 196-197. These exercises deal with the basics of the query system. Note that you can't actually test your solution to exercise 7.25 using the query-loop until you reach exercise 7.27. However, other than this you should test as you go. As the text of exercise 7.26 remarks, you should test each procedure independently rather than only in the context of the overall query-loop.
The final required part of the project is exercises 7.29-7.32. For these exercises you'll want to use the second version given in the text of the pattern/action list and the matches? procedure. The second of these versions is commented out at the bottom of the movie.scm file.

Initially, you may be mystified about why there are two sets of parens around ((bar baz)) at the bottom of page 196. In the later exercises you'll be extending the movie query system to handle multiple wildcards, so that

(substitutions-in-to-match
 '(what movies are made between _ and _ with ...)
 '(what movies are made between 1950 and 1955 with Fred Astaire))

(1950 1955 (Fred Astaire))

Back to MCS 177 home page