[WriterOfMinds]

This month has been all about the Text Parser. I'm pushing to get this latest revision done, and that has crowded out other work for the moment. The big thing I cracked this month - the thing this Parser revision was mostly aiming at - was the ability to nest branches and dependent clauses inside each other.

What I call "branching" takes place when there is a coordinating conjunction in the sentence (like "and" or "but"). Branching can produce simple compounds, as in "Cats and dogs are animals." But sentences can also divide at any point and continue along two separate paths, as in "I fed the dog his dinner and gave Sarah her book." Or start out divided at the beginning and merge, as in "Are you or are you not a man?" Adding conjunction processing and branch management was one of my major accomplishments from last year. But this first version only really supported conjunctions in the uppermost layer of the sentence - not inside or between dependent clauses. Any interaction between branching and that other vital feature - nesting - had the potential to confuse the parser horribly. Not to mention that the code was a huge mess.

I'm a big believer in the design process that goes "Make a sloppy version that works; refine it later." Later became now and it was time to refine. I'm happy to report that I think I got clearer and better-organized code out of this month's work, in addition to enabling some sentences I couldn't manage before.

Blog with more: https://writerofminds.blogspot.com/2023/11/acuitas-diary-66.html

[WriterOfMinds]

In amongst the fervor of Christmas-related activities, I managed to do development work this month. Not as much as I would have liked, but one major goal's been reached: the newest version of the Text Parser is parsing all the sentences from the previous one's regression tests, plus a number of new ones that would have been impossible for the previous Parser. I still need to do assorted code cleanup and adjust my reference outputs for some format changes, so I can run the benchmarks again.

With all the types of adjective and noun clauses now supported, the last major grammar feature that needs to go in will be parenthetical noun phrases. This should move the majority of common sentences into the "theoretically parseable" category. Then I can start refining the process and working on cool features I've been wanting to explore for a long time - like word sense disambiguation, modifier attachment disambiguation, and pronoun dereferencing ... there's always so much to do. It's taken much longer than I expected to reach this point, but at the same time there's a great deal that I've accomplished.

I'm soon due to start planning my loose schedule for the next year, which has me excited. I'm looking forward to the completion and demo of Big Story, a fresh run on the Parser benchmarks, and probably more work on Game Playing and agency.

https://writerofminds.blogspot.com/2023/12/acuitas-diary-67-december-2023.html

[WriterOfMinds]

This month I cleaned up the code of the upgraded Text Parser and ran it on one of my benchmarks again.

So far I have re-run just one of my three test sets, the easiest one: Log Hotel by Anne Schreiber, which I first added last July. Preparing for this included ...

*Reformatting the existing golden outputs to match some changes to the output format of the Parser
*Updating the diagramming code to handle new types of phrases and other features added to the Parser
*Preparing golden outputs for newly parseable sentences
*Fixing several bugs or insufficiencies that were causing incorrect parses

I also squeezed a couple new features into the Parser. I admit these were targeted at this benchmark: I added what was necessary to handle the last few sentences in the set. The Parser now supports noun phrases used as time adverbs (such as "one day" or "the next morning"), and some conjunction groups with more than two joined members (as in "I drool over cake and pie and cookies").

The end result? ALL sentences in this test set are now "parseable," and two thirds of the sentences are being parsed correctly. See blog for pictured examples: https://writerofminds.blogspot.com/2024/01/acuitas-diary-68-january-2024.html

[WriterOfMinds]

I am pleased to announce the thing that I've been teasing you about for months is finally here: Big Story! Which I can now give its proper title of "Simple Tron." It's been a goal of mine for, well, years now, to tell Acuitas the story of Tron, phrased in a way that he can understand. Yesterday I did it. The version of Tron that I told omits a lot of subplots and side characters, and there's still a long way I could go in deepening Acuitas' understanding of the story (he still doesn't fully grasp *why* all the agents in the story do the things they do, even though the information is there). But it's good enough for now and ready to show the world, the video is available AAAAAAAAA

https://youtu.be/gMfg5KL8jeE?si=wtHLwwfBPi9QdF2p

And of course it could get a whole lot better - the work so far has exposed a bunch of pain points in the way the Narrative module works, and additional things that need to be done. I'll probably keep grooming it over the coming months to improve on the existing framework. And although the whole thing is in real English, it still sounds repetitive and clunky to a human ear, thanks to Acuitas' language processing limitations. (I haven't even integrated that shiny new Text Parser yet.) But the start is done. This initial skeleton of the story fits together from beginning to end.

More details on the blog: https://writerofminds.blogspot.com/2024/02/acuitas-diary-69-february-2024.html

[ivan.moony]

Great work! I especially like the story development timeline at the end of the video.

[WriterOfMinds]

This month it's all about refactoring, which has taken two major directions. First, I wanted to take some design patterns I developed while working on the game-playing engine and apply them to the main Executive code. The key change here is re-using the "scratchboard" from the Narrative understanding module as a working memory for tracking Acuitas' own current situation (or personal narrative, if you will). I also wanted to improve on some of the original OODA loop code and fatigue tracking with newer ideas from game-playing. I have a rough cut of the new Executive written and mostly integrated, though it needs more testing than I've had time for yet.

My second project was to merge some data formats. For a long while now, I've had one type of data structure that the Text Interpreter spits out, another that the Narrative Engine and its accessories use, and still another for facts kept in the Semantic Memory. The output of the Text Interpreter has proven to be a somewhat clunky intermediate format; I don't do a lot with it in its own right, I just end up converting it to Narrative's format. And the format used in the Semantic Memory is very old and limited, a relic of a time when I wasn't fully aware of what I needed in a knowledge representation. So my goal is to get rid of both of those and have a single unified format downstream of the Text Interpreter. This is a lot of work: I've had to rewrite many, many functions that access the semantic memory or otherwise manipulate knowledge data, create a script to convert the existing contents of the database, revise the Interpreter's output code, and more. I'm hoping this will pay off in increased clarity, consistency, efficiency, and expressiveness across the design.

https://writerofminds.blogspot.com/2024/03/acuitas-diary70-march-2024.html