For the exact matcher, the system can recognize phrases without placeholders, and phrases with at most one placeholder, provided the value is between quotes.
(Except, I’ve just discovered a bug: https://github.com/stanford-oval/almond-cloud/issues/614)
The full model (after a round of training, which I started), can recognize unquoted values, because it is trained with all possible values. It can also recognize sentences with more than one value, provided the relevant primitive templates are added.
Note that placeholders (primitive template parameters) are different than function parameters. Function parameters determine what information is passed to your code, while placeholders determine what information is extracted from the sentence. If you type in a sentence without parameters, but it maps to a function with required parameters, then Almond will ask for the value separately.
So to test, you should declare your functions to have all the parameters you need, and then write a whole bunch of primitive templates, some with many placeholders and some with only few or none. In fact, it is a good idea to write many primitive templates for different parameter combinations regardless, as it helps training the full model.