Mystery Number Four - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 80

which corresponds to a trigger concept provided by the agent's current situa-
tion. Consider the following example:

5.4.1 T RIGGER CONCEPT SUBACTIVATING CORRESPONDING TOKEN LINE
member proplets owner proplet trigger concept

⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤

⎦ ... core: hot

adj: hot
mdd: potato
prn: 20

adj: hot
mdd: water
prn: 32

adj: hot
mdd: potato
prn: 55

adj: hot
mdd: day
prn: 79

⎣ ⎦ ⎣ ⎦ ⎣ ⎦ ⎣

⇐

hot

The trigger concept hot provided by the agent's external recognition matches
thecorevalue hot of an owner record in the agent's Word Bank. This subacti-
vates the associated token line.
However, if a continuous sequence of trigger concepts were to always sub-
activate complete token lines, the resulting amount of data would be too large
to be useful. Therefore, the second step is to use the semantic relations of
functor-argument and coordination connecting the incoming concepts for re-
stricting subactivation via intersection of the relevant token lines. In this way,
the more semantically connected the concepts coming in, the more narrow and
specific the subactivated data (search space reduction).
For example, if the agent's durrent recognition relates hot and potato as
modifier-modified, the token lines of hot and potato might contain the fol-
lowing intersections, indicated typographically by bold face:

5.4.2 I NTERSECTING TOKEN LINES FOR hot AND potato
member proplets owner proplets

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

adj: hot
mdd: potato
prn: 20

adj: hot
mdd: water
prn: 32

adj: hot
mdd: potato
prn: 55

adj: hot
mdd: day
prn: 79

core: hot

...

...

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

noun: potato
fnc: look_for
mdr: hot
prn: 20

noun: potato
fnc: cook
mdr: big
prn: 35

noun: potato
fnc: find
mdr: hot
prn: 55

noun: potato
fnc: eat
mdd: small
prn: 88

core: potato

...

The example contains two intersections, each consisting of two proplets shar-
ing (i) a prn value and (ii) the modifier-modified relation between hot and
potato . The intersections differ from each other in their respective prn values,
20 and 55 ,andthe fnc values of the nouns, look_for and find .
The third step of a primary subactivation consists of completing an intersec-
tion into a full proposition. It is based on subactivating the intrapropositional
semantic relations (spreading activation, Quillian 1968). For example, using
the functor-argument coded by the leftmost proplets in 5.4.2, the intersection
may be completed into a proposition: .