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Meeting with Brenda Harger: Meaning of Character
We met with Brenda Harger to discuss the nature and meaning of character.

Character outside of context:
  • Memorable characters can stand on their own, though sometimes only as "types".
  • Characters with strong personalities are usually actor-driven, not plot-driven.
How much does context define character?
  • The circumstances of the world the character inhabits determine the actions available for characters to perform.
  • Dialog itself does not have to deal with actions.
How does an actor define a character?
  • Starting with the text of the script: What does their character do? What do they want?
  • Find all the things in the play that the character says about them self and all the things that are said about the character by others.
  • Analyze the background characteristics of the world in which the characters live.
Intention is the objective of the character: what they want, and what they'll do to get it. The nuances of a character reveal their intentions.

References to look at:
  • 6 Characters in Search of a Play
  • Naturalism: Chekhov
  • Symbolism: Strindberg
  • Modernism: Mamet
  • Absurdism: Ionesco
Meeting with Michael Mateas: Expressive AI

We met with Michael Mateas to discuss the work he has done in related fields to our own project.

Relevant papers to look at:
Meeting with Teruko Mitamura: Language Technologies Institute

We met with the LTI to discuss the concepts we had for the design of the Dialog Engine and to get possible contact information for others inside and outside the LTI who might be able to help us in our efforts.

One excellent result of the meeting was in the form of validation of some of our concepts as well as to warn us of the ambitiousness of what we were attempting.

Contacts suggested during the meeting:
  • Jamie Callan - Text analysis tools
  • Bob Frederking - Dialog generation
  • Michael Mulden - NLP
  • Eric Nyberg - System engineering
Meeting with Bob Frederking

We discussed our system concepts and the tools we had chosen to use and received some very helpful suggestions on who we should contact within the LTI as well as what specific research we should look at on CMU's campus.

Contacts suggested during the meeting:
  • Alon Lavie - Parsers
  • Donna Gates - WordNet knowledge
Meeting with Jamie Callan

Mr. Callan went over all aspects of our system and had very helpful suggestions on the current problems and pitfalls in our implementation. We also ended up with a very good picture of possible solutions to those problems along with pointers to some research areas we could investigate.
Research suggested during the meeting:
  • Southern Methodist University - Question answering system
  • Mike Collins' statistically-based parser
  • NIST.gov Website for TREC conference papers
 Concepts for improvements:
  • Density-based queries
  • Phrase queries ("hairy arms" vs. "hairy", "arms")
  • TFIDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency)
  • Prefer mediocre matches across multiple topics than one high certainty match
  • Noun sequence searching
  • Web-search-based topic expansion
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