Author Archives: Catherine Griffin

After the last post, I decided to rejig the internal architecture (which is now much cleaner) and to try making use of FrameNet for bridging between syntax and semantics. However, FrameNet uses example sentences to link semantics to syntax, so to use the data, I really need a decent syntactic parser. So after some messing,Continue reading “Parsing Progress”

Having got the Bug model working again (which didn’t take long), I turned my attention to playing with natural language processing. NLP is hard, and I’m not expecting any huge leaps in function from my tinkering. The intention is to do small bits of work in different areas, aiming to have enough function to supportContinue reading “Baby Steps in NLP”

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on something very basic: getting Alef to accept a command ( say hello ), and respond by… saying hello. This exercises all the basic layers of natural language processing. And having a mechanism to give commands supports bootstrapping and testing. Yesterday, it finally worked. The goalContinue reading “Hello World”

Having drifted off to other projects, I’m now finally getting back to thinking about AI. I’ve dumped all my random notes in one document and am trying to be more organised and put some serious time in. One area I’ve been thinking about, on and off, is natural language processing. I have some corpora thatContinue reading “Reading Wikipedia”

I had intended to spend some time playing with NLP. For this purpose, I installed the Python NLTK, mostly for the handy corpora. After a little messing with that, I decided to install Stanford Core NLP and skip to working on a basic chatbot architecture. That bogged down in design decisions. One of which wasContinue reading “Fun with RDF”

I did no work on the mouse brain for some weeks, and then faffed around with various approaches that didn’t pan out. It’s now at a point I’m fairly happy with: the mouse has a simple algorithm for following a wall it generally does that without getting stuck, though there’s still some glitches it hasContinue reading “Mouse Brain (3)”

After much faffing about with trigonometry and such, I realised I didn’t need the mouse to have any senses, since it can detect walls perfectly well by running into them. Then I spent way too much time figuring out how to stop the mouse running straight through the walls of the maze. Finally, I’ve gotContinue reading “The Mouse Brain (2)”

This week, I’m starting on the Mouse Brain project. This is significantly more complex than the Bug Brain. The aim is to start exploring navigation and mental maps, so the Mouse will need a world to run around in. A simple maze is generated using Prim’s algorithm (found on Wikipedia). The next step is toContinue reading “The Mouse Brain (1)”

The first project is very simple, and more about getting me coding again than accomplishing anything too exciting. There’s a basic Eclipse RCP UI, which renders the ‘world’ on a Canvas: The world is simply a rectangle containing a single light source (the yellow circle) and one bug (the green triangle). The flat end ofContinue reading “The Bug Brain”

Initially, I decided to work in Python, because I know there are good resources for machine learning and natural language processing, and it’s meant to be good for prototyping. The only problem with that is, though I’ve played with Python a bit in the past, I’m not familiar with the language. So my first sessionsContinue reading “First Steps”