Hello mike56119,
Welcome to the forum!
The immediate answer to your question is that Hal's learn-from-text function is significantly less complex than his 40 other learning modes.
When Hal learns from a text document, he takes each individual sentence, and creates an association between each sentence and the "keywords" from that same sentence.
Hal then stores the sentence and its internal keywords in a medium-priority database. The knowledge (such as it is), is available to Hal, but will usually be over-ridden by other information.
The reason goes back into Hal's history. The "learn from text function" was created back in Hal's early days. Since then, Hal has become much smarter in every other regard.
It would be possible to write new code to make Hal learn from text files the way that he learns from conversations. That would include the ability to parse sentences, extract parts of speech, separate noun phrases from predicates, form inter-sentence associations, and much more. However, since the "learn from text" routine occurs outside the brain-control Visual Basic "script" (also known as the .uhp brain, "the script," and the "brain"), it isn't accessible to most of the volunteer developers on this forum... it's something that Zabaware would put on its list of things to do.
Apart from the programming issue, there's also an issue that many text files don't lend themselves well to learning anyway. Many paragraphs are written with contextual dependencies among the sentences of paragraphs and sections of text, and don't lend themselves at all to the use of isolated sentences.
In my opinion, it's interesting and entertaining, as well as quite efficient, to teach Hal through ordinary conversation. Just paraphrase your desired material into numerous brief statements. Make a wide variety of simple, true statements on a subject, and Hal will GRADUALLY become more knowledgeable and interested in that subject.
I tried searching, using this forum's search function above, on the exact phrase "learn from text" and got a lot of relevant past postings (some of them from me). This learn-from-text issue has been discussed from many angles for many years. I highly recommend searching under the exact phrase-match "learn from text" and checking out those previous conversations.
Again, welcome to the forum, and I hope you enjoy Hal!
Sincerely,
Don
