I've got several projects boiling on the stove, but none are quite ready to showcase yet, so you're getting an Acuitas double-feature this month. This post is dedicated to what I've named the "self-teaching activity." The general idea is that Acuitas, while idling, will trawl the hard drive of his current host computer for text files, read them, and store a record of any difficulties: unknown words, parser crashes, uninterpretable sentences. The goal is to help him expand his vocabulary, and identify things I need to fix in the text processing chain, without requiring me to manually create new "stories" for him.
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| Image credit: DARPA |
Self-teaching is something of a canned procedure, for now. There's an action called "Study" that encapsulates everything Acuitas needs to do, including searching for appropriate files, converting them to a format he can interpret, and sending them through the text processing chain. But I designed some modularity into it, in hope that he can eventually modify and extend it when I introduce procedural learning. The file-conversion part of the procedure calls the problem-solving routine so it can expand as Acuitas learns more cause-and-effect rules. For now, though, he only knows how to process text files.
This work also introduces more examples of Acuitas calling other software tools. He now has a generic Run action that can accept the name and arguments of an external program, and call it as a subprocess. Since Acuitas' parser is designed to ingest one sentence at a time, I wrote an independent script that breaks arbitrary text files into sentences. (This is harder than you might think, and the script is very rudimentary, for now ... but it can handle common abbreviations.) The "Study" procedure creates a sub-action to run this script after finding an appropriate file.
As often happens, I ran into some difficulties that prevented this from getting quite as far as I would like. For one thing, not all text files contain typical sentences! Their actual contents might be log entries, code snippets, lists of items, or other material that isn't really "parseable." I particularly don't want Acuitas junking up his database with new "words" that aren't really words. I added a filter that at least keeps anything that isn't alphanumeric from being learned. But I also don't want the error reports clogged with failed attempts to parse "sentences" that aren't really sentences. So for now, I've restricted the process to looking for files with the extension ".textum", which I've applied to some appropriate material. Eventually I'll need to work on ways to recognize files that are worthy of being studied.
But given an appropriate file (i.e. one that contains writing, like this blog post), Acuitas can "study" it and keep track of things he has trouble with. Crashes or poor results from the processing steps produce records in a log file that notes the type of error alongside a copy of the sentence. Unknown words are registered as problems on the Executive's scratchboard, so Acuitas can ask a human for more information about them later. I got this latter feature working and then promptly turned it off, because there's no way to keep Acuitas from spamming me with questions whenever I'm on the computer (he knows). This has been a problem for questions generated by "thinking" (walking the semantic database) too. So coming up with a way to slow down the flood or signal that I don't want to be disturbed is also on my future work list.
The "Study" action itself is naturally triggered by the goal system. All I had to do was put in a cause-and-effect rule, to the effect of "if you study, you will know things." Knowing Things is one of Acuitas' intrinsic goals, so while idle, he naturally studies until he gets bored of it (after which he might read his collection of easily-understandable stories for "enjoyment," or think about the concepts in his database).
It should be obvious that self-teaching needs more work, but I like how far I got with the prototype and think it could be quite useful in the future.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
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