How to correctly process time references like "tomorrow"?

ChatGPT Use cases and examples
1

Hi,

I have created different assistants with custom functions, which I use with my local python script to process and forward to a booking service via API.
The assistant and the function calling all works well. The major problem I have is with time statements like “book an appointment for tomorrow at 1 o’clock”. the time of 1 PM is always understood. The problem lies with “tomorrow” or anything abstract like today, next Monday, whatever. Inherently, the GPT does not have this data in its training model and it does not have access to real time data.

has anyone found a way to correctly process user input for timings like this? I dont want to force the user to say “I want to book an appointment on Jan 5th, 2024 at 1 PM”. this is not intuitive or conversantional. Also, I dont want the user to receive a dumb link to be forwarded to and make the appointment there. this breaks the media in which the user is. it should be an end-to-end experience.

even GPT version 4 does not handle this in any accurate fashion.

any hints are appreciated.

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2

You may have to code these specific things directly, and then weave them back into the prompt.

For example, you compute “tomorrow” as:

datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(days=1)

and then you format it to your satisfaction, then provide this in the prompt for the LLM to use.

3

I think I would first establish a knowledge of date formats employed, along with injection of session start and current time, and user locale and UTC offset.

Then you have to make understanding of dates clear.

Date formats - making their output and understanding predictable

There are multiple worldwide schemas of date that the language model may have been trained on, so discovering the day that comes after 08/08/2023 may be quite a difficult task to predict.

I would specify particular things the AI needs to know in system prompt description or in clear function parameter descriptions, such as the below prompt enhancement, which may be good to reinforce for any date-based AI application:

[Date input/output format]
Preferred: September 14, 2023
Compact: 14-Sep-2023
API: “09/14/2023”
Scheduling: “09/14/2023 14:30”
[/quote]

Having that, you can clean the multiple examples of time from your function that are ripe for confusion, and just concentrate on specifying where the date should come from that it will put in the function, and its use.

Understanding user’s ambigous dates

And then comes the logic: "Do you have any appointments available two weeks from now? It has to have a calendar, understand the starting and ending days of the week, be able to calculate date ranges, etc – all from prediction of the most likely word that should be output.

Functions for calculating common terms

Priming it with features it is lacking in mental abilities, a “print_calendar” function, a “days_between_dates” calculator, a “next week’s dates” function, etc can both enhance (and confuse) the AI.

(mostly cut and paste from a previous answer of mine, to show “has anyone found a way”)

1 Like
4

Ok, instead of getting parts of the prompt and programming the logic into this myself, I tried injecting the current date at the very start of a thread as context information. first tests are promising. I need to integrate this into my final solution to see if it would still work, but it seems to be an elegant way to still leverage LLM capabilities without having to create custom logic and cover all possible use cases of what users may put into their prompts.

5

Hi all,
I work for an AI powered app for sport coaching and I also faced dates issues.
The problem is the following: from a query in natural language, return all dates that are mentioned.
In my context, the user enter various time references:

  • The universal ones: on 8th October, tomorrow, next Monday, 04/12…
  • The ones that need internal data, referring to the athlete’s schedule: two days after my next race, until the end of the season…

In addition, I have to handle different dates format: 04/05 can be the 4th of May or the 5th of April, depending on the athlete’s locale.
Finally, some queries must be understood as a continuous period of time, with a start date and an end date: “until monday”.
Other queries are just a list of dates: “today and monday”
I did several tests using parsedatetime, PySpark NLP and scacy nlp, regex: all failed in some cases.
Also giving some explicit dates to chatGPT 3.5 did not really help as it does not compute anything. In some cases “in two days” outputs a wrong date, even with today’s date as a context.
So I wanted to share the technique I finally chose to achieve the task.

The first step is to use the LLM to transform the query into a structured output that expresses the time references as a simple arithmetic formula that involves supposedly known events. See the examples below to understand.
The second step is to process this output after replacing all events by the real dates.

STEP 1
Here is the prompt I use:

"""
Transform the sentence into a JSON that I can use to compute the exact dates.
You can use any of the following time references that I know the dates of: 
- TODAY: current date
- TOMORROW: tomorrow's date
- END_OF_MONTH: the last day of the current month
- MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY, SUNDAY: the days of the week
- BASE_START, BUILD_START, PEAK_START, TAPER_START, RECOVERY_START: the start date of the base, build, peak, taper and recovery phases respectively
- BASE_END, BUILD_END, PEAK_END, TAPER_END, RECOVERY_END: the end date of the base, build, peak, taper and recovery phases respectively
- RACE, GOAL: the date of the next race or goal respectively
- END_OF_SEASON: the day the current sport season ends

If the sentence mentions a period of consecutive days, the output must be of the form:
    {"start": start date, "end": end date}
If the sentence mentions one or several dates, the output must be of the form:
    {"list": the list of dates}

The dates you give MUST respect the date format "YYYY-MM-DD".
If you can't compute the dates, express them with the simplest arithmetic formula involving the previous time references. 
For your calculations, the unit is one day. Also, consider that a week contains 7 days, and a month contains 30 days.
Some dates may be explicitly given in the __MESSAGE_DATE_FORMAT__.
If no event are explicitly mentioned or if you can't extract any date, return 
    {"error": true}
Today's date: __TODAY__.

Examples:
- "new workout" -> {"error": true}
- "new workout today" -> {"list": ["TODAY"]}
- "add workout in 4 days" -> {"list": ["TODAY + 4"]}
- "replan until the end of the week" -> {"start": "TODAY", "end": "SUNDAY"}
- "on April 10th and also 15th" -> {"list": ["2024-04-10", "2024-04-15"]}
- "the next two weeks" -> {"start": "TODAY", "end": "TODAY + 14"]}
- "until 4 days after next monday" -> {"start": "TODAY", "end": "MONDAY + 4"}
- "replan on 10 07 2024 and 20th of July" -> {"list": ["__EXAMPLE_2024-07-10__", "2024-07-20"]}
- "replan until 10 07 2024" -> {"start": "TODAY", "end": "__EXAMPLE_2024-07-10__"}
- "replan until 10 07" -> {"start": "TODAY", "end": "__EXAMPLE_2024-07-10__"}
- "days off on 30th of April" -> {"list": ["2024-04-30"]}
- "from sunday to next wednesday" -> {"start": "SUNDAY", "end": "WEDNESDAY + 7"}
- "i need to take days off" -> {"error": true}
- "2 days after my next build phase" -> {"list": ["BUILD + 2"]}
- "one week before my next race" -> {"list": ["RACE - 7"]}

Context:
__CONTEXT__
The sentence comes from someone living in __ORIGIN__.
"""

Then replace the following keywords:

- __MESSAGE_DATE_FORMAT__: "US date format" if the user is from the US, else "European date format" (to avoid confusion for the 04/05 example).
- __TODAY__: today's date, with the name of the day
- __EXAMPLE_2024-07-10__: "2024-10-07" if the user is from the US, else "2024-07-10" (this is to make the LLM understand how such date must be understood)
- __ORIGIN__: "the US", for US user, else "Europe".
-__CONTEXT__: some other context if you have one.

STEP 2
Get the output from STEP 1 and replace all keywords (TODAY, RACE, …) with the real dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
Then call the LLM with the result and the following prompt (ask also to return JSON output):

"""Here is a simple aritmetic formula to compute a date. All given dates are in the format YYYY-MM-DD. Return a valid JSON of the form {"date": the computed date in the format YYYY-MM-DD}"""

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6

Same issue I am also facing as llm wont be able to understand then I search I got one medium blog to pass the current date and time in every request with prompt’s so that llm can be able to respond accordingly
Here is the soltions you guys can use it :-

from datetime import datetime
import openai

Initialize the OpenAI client with your API key

OPENAI_API_KEY= “Your Open AI API key”

client = openai.OpenAI(
api_key=‘YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY’)

def extract_date_time(query):
now = datetime.now()
# Generate a prompt for ChatGPT, including the current date and time
prompt = f"““Given a user query for a journey, extract the date and time.
Today’s date and time are {now}.
Format the date as DD/MM/YYYY and the time as HH:MM.
User query: "{query}"””"

# Request a completion from ChatGPT
response = client.chat.completions.create(
           model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
           messages=[{"role": "user", "content": prompt}],
           temperature=0.5,
           max_tokens=100
 )
# Print the extracted date and time
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Example query

query = “I need to go to Morden Underground Station next Friday at 3 pm.”
extract_date_time(query)

Query: “I need to go to Morden Underground Station next Friday at 3 pm.”

Response:
Date: 23/07/2024
Time: 17:10