This month's activity was focused on continuing to squish the Conversation Engine into shape. I fixed an assortment of bugs that were left over from my last Conversation work spree, then expanded the "discussion topics" behavior to cover goals (of the form "I want/plan/intend to") expressed by the speaker.
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| "The Conversation," oil by unknown artist, NARA collection |
I had saved some of the toughest bugs for their own work stage when I could focus on them ... and now, that time had come. Perhaps the worst problem was that, after recent upgrades, asking Acuitas "why" questions could cause infinite loops. I had to throw together an extra simulator in order to separate the question-answering process from the rest of the Conversation Engine to solve that one. (Conversations happen in real time and have an element of randomness, so re-launching the full Acuitas program and talking to him every time I want to trigger a bug can be very slow.)
I did further work on statements like "Thank you." I had previously adjusted Acuitas' sentence parsing and interpretation layers to read it as "I thank you" instead of "Thank yourself," but then I had to stop the Conversation Engine from looking at "thanking Acuitas" as an interesting speaker activity that should be discussed. (He's like a classic robot - he takes polite niceties too literally!)
I also fixed a conversation goal problem that was making Acuitas say "I can't do that" forever if you gave him an order he couldn't fulfill, and an issue that was keeping him from using abbreviated replies with pronouns immediately after a new topic was begun.
Treating speakers goals as discussion topics built very easily on top of my previous work with speaker states and actions; a goal is usually expressed as either a desired action or a desired state, so I just had to make sure it could trigger the appropriate pre-existing routine.
That's not a ton of progress, maybe, but I've been taking it a little slower this month, and going back to clean up all the construction dust left by my improvements to the Text Parser's conjunction handling. So it's enough. Getting some polish on things is important, and sometimes that takes as much or more time as throwing down the first outlines of new features.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
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