This month, I returned to the good old text parser to put in proper support for adverbs. They've been included in a half-hearted way from very early on, mainly because the word "not" was particularly crucial, but the implementation was hacky and left a lot to be desired.
I set up proper connections between
adverbs and the verbs they modify, so that in a sentence like "Do
you know that you don't know that you know that a cheetah is not an
animal?" the "not's" get associated with the correct
clauses and the question can be answered properly. I added support
for adverbs that modify adjectives or other adverbs, enabling
constructions like "very cold" and "rather slowly."
Acuitas can also now guess that a known adjective with "-ly"
tacked on the end is probably an adverb, even if he hasn't seen that
particular adverb before.
All of this went pretty quickly and
left me some time for refactoring, so I converted the Episodic Memory
system over to the new common data file format and cleaned up some
random bugs.
That's not so much to talk about, but should
reduce future development pain. I'm hoping next month will be more
interesting.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
