Lesson 14. Identify what the person asks for

Why this matters

Шахмат қашан? (“When is chess?”) and Шахмат қайда? (“Where is chess?”) concern the same class but ask for different records. The question type, often called intent, is the kind of information wanted: time or place here. It is not the information itself. A form saying “item requested” is not the delivered item.

The whole program first

Create intent.py in UTF-8. Use қашан (“when”) and қайда (“where”) as exact teaching clues. If both occur, preserve both types rather than silently choosing the first. text stores the lowercase question, clean removes ? and ,, and words stores the resulting words.

text = input("Сұрақ: ").lower()
clean = text.replace("?", "").replace(",", "")
words = clean.split()
intents = []
if "қашан" in words:
    intents.append("уақыт")
if "қайда" in words:
    intents.append("орын")
print(intents)

The ready-to-run file has the same program.

words is the list produced by splitting, as in lesson 7. intents = [] is an empty list of detected types. Two separate if statements test both words: the second still runs after the first matched. append from lesson 13 adds a label. уақыт means “time” and орын means “place”; these are labels for looking up later records, not a found time or location. Шахмат қашан? gives ['уақыт'], Шахмат қайда? gives ['орын'], and Шахмат қашан қайда? gives ['уақыт', 'орын']. As in lesson 13, replace removes both ? and commas, so Шахмат қашан, қайда? also gives both types. Other punctuation still remains.

Шахмат неге? gives []: неге (“why?” or “to what?” depending on context) is outside our two supported types. An empty list does not make the question meaningless. Word order and endings are not analyzed yet; a match must be a whole word after split().

Memory map

Question → word list → қашан present? add “time” → қайда present? add “place” → keep every found type.

Recall and task

Hide the code and explain why we use two if statements, not if/elif. Run Сурет қашан?, Сурет қайда?, Сурет қашан қайда?, and Сурет неге?.

Task: predict the outputs for ҚАЙДА? and an empty input. Hint: lower() changes case; the list may stay empty. Answer: ['орын'] and []. Common mistake: seeing ['уақыт'] and thinking the program already knows the schedule. It knows only the kind of fact needed; the facts come in lessons 16–20.