Sunday, August 23, 2020

Acuitas Diary #29 (August 2020)

 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