Progress has been all over the place this month, partly because I had a vacation near the end of it. I kept working on the Narrative and Game Playing tracks that have been occupying me recently, and threw in the beginnings of a Text Generator overhaul. Nothing is really *done* at the moment, but Game Playing is closing in on the possibility of a very simple demo.
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| Hear ye, hear ye ... "I get the pizza." |
In Narrative, I continued to work on the Big Story, this time adding the sentences that set up the conflict between two of the major characters. There wasn't a lot of new conceptual work here - just dealing with bugs and insufficiencies to get the results I expected, so that Narrative would detect the appropriate threats, successes, failures, etc. Not a lot to say there, except that it's slowly coming together.
On the game-playing front, in my test scenario I got as far as having Acuitas solve a simple problem by taking an item and then using it. A prominent feature that had to be added was the ability to move from the general to the specific. As we saw last month, a problem like "I'm hungry" suggests a solution like "eat food," which spawns the necessary prerequisite "get food." But it is not actually possible to get food, or even to get bread or bananas or pizza, because these are all abstract categories. One must instead get that bread over there, or this particular banana, or the pizza in the oven - individual instances of the categories. Narrative was already capable of checking whether a character's use of a specific object satisfied the more general conditions of a goal. For game-playing, I have to go the other way: given a goal, determine which items in the scenario could satisfy it, and choose one to fit in each of the goal's categorical slots so that it becomes actionable.
So a goal like "I want to get food" should result in Acuitas saying "I get <object>," where object is some particular food item that I already told him was in the environment. The absence of a suitable item should provoke seeking behavior, but ... we're not quite there yet.
As for the Text Generator - this is the part of the language toolkit that converts Acuitas' internal knowledge representations ("the gist," if you will) into complete spoken sentences. It has an input format which is now outdated compared to other parts of the system, and it was starting to become cumbersome to use and inadequate to everything Acuitas needed to say. For example, it could automatically add articles where needed, but didn't have a good way to indicate that a definite article ("the pizza") was needed in lieu of an indefinite one ("a pizza"). So I started revising it. The new version is sketched out and now needs testing, expansion and integration.
So I can't report a lot of full accomplishments but there are many things moving forward. More soon!
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
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