Contented Laziness

I am overwhelmed by a sense of contented laziness. What is to become of the intellectual life?

If I was going to build a robot...

Watched a movie, "Hot Bot", about a sex doll robot. Lately, watching things like that has led to distracting thoughts about how I would go about building a piece of software that, at least linguistically, behaves like a person in a particular environment (a narrow world). What is surprising is that this thought even crosses my mind. With working theories of language at hand, I sense that a great deal of the "intelligence" in conversation is already embodied in the word knowledge - per the word trees and structured relations that I know how to define. And I think it gets me close enough to have the thought cross my mind and wonder: what else I need in order to create a chatbot that can, itself, fall in love (as in the movie)? I am wondering how software should model "pain"?

Atmospheric "filament"

From "Jos" at weerrecords, via David Sands:

"The Earth's atmosphere has a tendency to form filaments, very long thin streams of air with similar properties, for example this one from yesterday with North Amnerican wildfire smoke.

Rarely seen such a nice one. The bloody thing must be more than 10,000 km long. #TROPOMI #S5P"

[Peter says: proud to be cc'd by David Sands]

God is in heaven

And my context code is checked into Git Hub

Topic Trees and Chatbot Conversational Context published

Here, in another "fly by night" Asian journal, I got  my article published.

I should mention the main motivation was to be able to reference the article in another article that I am writing.

Also: the paper is not that good. I was mixing together adjectives and noun word trees. That is computationally reasonable but epistemologically wrong.

Small footprint NLU

A news article just handed me a 'selling point' for Narawhal: my trees are extremely small footprint resources.

They have to store weights on individual example expressions. Yet they are beginning to talk about "small footprint natural language understanding" - something which already has a name: "Narrow world" nlu.

Starting to settle in, in Woods Hole

First you must get some art on the wall!

Studies in neuro imaging #1

I have been to quite a few lectures this summer in Woods Hole that purported to be studying how the brain works by taking on the subject of 'memory' and 'synaptic plasticity', along with brain 'regions'. Along with being hopelessly vague, this contains the reductionist fallacy of projecting an abstraction into an anatomical distinction.
My point really is that we can do better at considering cognitive functions. Consider a couple of experiments:
Experiment #1: You try to find anatomic changes corresponding to someone making a plan that combines an image with a linguistic pattern.
Experiment #2: You touch someone on the leg, then ask them to touch the same place.

Is conscious thought suspended while dreaming?

Or is it stopped, to resume based on the dream?

Is this even a meaningful question?

Two linguistic systems?

Current theory is that language processing has a global sequence of "operations" driven by the incoming sequence of topic nouns, combined with a local sequence of operations driven by surrounding adjectives and verbs. A real distinction could underlie these two different aspects of processing.

FAQ chatbot diary 2

Playing with FAQ for an HR department, where the "answers" guide a user to the web page resource. The topic tree:

ROOT
   FAQPERSON
   FAQTOPIC
       PERSONAL
           CONTACT
           PHOTO
       EXPENSES
       BENEFITS

I propose to use:
DESIRES is a VAR with keywords like "I want..., can I..., how do I...".
INFO is a VAR with sub-VARs for ABOUT, CHANGE, FIND, each having its own keywords.

And a narrative of the form

action(DESIRE,  FAQTOPIC, INFO)

Producing a record of the form

(topicID, [ info, status ] )

FAQ Chatbot Diary

I can come back and edit this as time goes bye although I should really start a separate blog for it. The idea is to keep track of how a Conversational Context may get created. Having gotten a preliminary read() algorithm working, I am ready to try it on something other than dentistry [which is my "go to" example of word trees]. So, I gave up previous chatbot development when I got to the FAQ chatbot example. At the time it seemed much harder than it should be, causing me to want to either give up or re-think things. So the re-thinking has taken place, let's see how easy it is to create an FAQ chatbot. However, I had the thought last night that there is no reason to think any particular  Conversational Context tree is "easy" to come up with. If it is like a number system used to describe one part of the conversational world, one should not assume it is generic and just like some other part of the conversational world. We don't know. Maybe later. For now, I was thinking it would be fun to force myself to work on FAQs, and to watch if there is any development.

My starting point has been a document called "Guidelines to HR's FAQ" I got from my employer. I have been looking at the topics listed there and playing with the idea that some topics involve one or another type of question, and toying with the idea that there is a 'client' and an 'agency'. So I wrote down some of the topics, organized a bit under "personal" versus "informational". And today I am starting to wonder why not simply get started building a tree with:

ROOT
    client
    agency
    questions
    topics

But you can see that is not right. Questions are attributes of context. And the client is not really a conversational frame. So...first steps are hard.

Analyzing geometric singularities linguistically

Well, here is an idea that propagates backwards from linguistics to differential geometry:

The higher order derivatives of position on a manifold (or at least an embedded manifold), can be used to find an object which "best fit"s the manifold at a point. The family of objects used for the fitting is restricted to entities having constant such derivatives after a specified order. For example, curves in 3D space can be fit with lines, osculating circles, and helices of constant radius and torsion. Surfaces in 3D can be fit with planes, spheres, and....

Singularities in a manifold are an opportunity to "best fit" with other families of entities besides the ones with constant higher order derivatives. That one can choose from among different such families is an idea - the best model - that is more evident in linguistics than in geometry - but there it is - a way to analyze singularities.