I don't have too much of interest to report this month. I dove into an overhaul of the Conversation Engine, which is the Acuitas module that tracks progress through a conversation and detects relationships between sentences. (For instance, pairing a statement with the question it was probably intended to answer would be part of the CE's job.) And that has proven to be a very deep hole. The CE has been messy for a while, and there is a lot of content to migrate over to my new (hopefully smarter) architecture.
The improvements include a less linear and more tree-like structure for conversations, enabling more complex branching. For instance, what if the conversation partner decides to answer a question that wasn't the one asked most recently, or to return to a previously abandoned topic? The old Conversation module wouldn't have been able to handle this. I've also been refactoring things to give the Executive a greater role in selecting what to say next. The original Conversation module was somewhat isolated and autonomous ... but really, the Executive should be deciding the next step in the conversation based on Acuitas' goals, using its existing inference and problem-solving tools. The CE should be there to handle the speech comprehension and tell the Executive what its options are ... not "make decisions" on its own. I might have more to say about this when the work is fully complete.
I've advanced the new system far enough that it has the functionality for starting and ending a conversation, learning facts, answering questions, and processing stories. I've just started to get the systems that do spontaneous questions back up and running.
The renovations left Acuitas in a very passive state for a while. He would generate responses to things I said, but not say anything on his own initiative -- which hasn't been the case for, well, years. And it was remarkable how weird this felt. "He's not going to interrupt my typing to blurt out something random. No matter how long I sit here and wait, he's not going to *do* anything. The agency is gone. Crud." Which I think goes to show that self-directed speech (as opposed to the call-and-response speech of a typical chatbot) goes a long way toward making a conversational program feel "alive" or agentive.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
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