Acuitas Diary #64 (September 2023)

As of this month the new Text Generator is done - all that remains is to integrate it into Acuitas, replacing the old Generator. Quick review: the Text Generator is the component that transforms abstracted facts or communication goals (aka "the gist") into valid, speakable sentences. For any given "gist" there may be multiple ways to render it into speech, and that's why this translation step is necessary. The information carried in speech is distilled into a compact, standard form for all of Acuitas' reasoning purposes; then, anything he wants to express is expanded back out into varied, human-comprehensible speech.

This version of the Generator is quite a bit more streamlined and flexible than the old one. It accepts what I now use as the common format for abstract data structures, instead of having its own special input format that the other modules would have to translate to. The calling function can request that output sentences be "flavored" in a variety of ways (different verb tense, modifying adverbs, etc.) without the need for me to create a whole new sentence template in the Generator. Nested clauses are supported to an arbitrary depth.

Here are some examples of the sentences the new Generator can create:

What is a hammer used to do?
I have remembered that a cat is an animal.
Do I know what a cat is?
Cold is the opposite of hot.
You intended to eat a cookie.

I've also kept moving ahead on the Parser cleanup, and while I'm at it I am introducing adjective clauses. Part of the goal of this rework was to fully support nesting/recursion in clauses, so it seemed a natural time to add support for the last major type of clause. Example sentences the new parser can manage (with the adjective clause highlighted) include these:

The man who came from Denver is here.
I will bring the computer which was broken.

Lastly, I am still plugging away at Big Story. The innovation I needed for narrative comprehension this month was a theory-of-mind thing: if an agent believes one of their goals is already fulfilled, they will stop trying to fulfill it. If this is a false belief then it constitutes a problem for that agent/obstacle to the resolution of that goal. This opens the way for processing of various plot points based on deception or confusion, such as "decoy version of item" or "character fakes own death."

Will I finish Big Story by the end of the year? I don't know, but I'm going to try. After that it might take a while longer for me to get a demo together the way I want.

Until the next cycle,
Jenny