Ashika’s Status Update for Mar 21

The events this week did not affect the software side too much. The whole system latency requirement has been scrapped, but that is mostly due to integration problems. For the software component, I actually managed to get the program running faster after switching to using thesaurus.com instead of NLTK to collect synonyms. Now, when the user inputs a word, the program searches it up on thesaurus.com and parses the result, and then feeds the gathered synonyms or antonyms to fitBERT. Originally, I considered combining the two techniques for better results, but I found that thesaurus.com by itself was performing quite well, so I kept it as the only tool for synonym generation. Using a machine learning model would just increase latency for an unnoticeable increase in accuracy, and without the use of a GPU and with all the latency problems we will have with integration, it is a better idea to just use previously documented synonyms.

Synonym generation was the only component on the software side that changed in design. I ironed out the user program and added user error detection as well as a translation system from NLTK parts of speech to user friendly parts of speech. The only part of the storytelling algorithm left to do is to make the templates and add in grammar correction after user input is provided. I am currently working on the other states as well, such as the directions and the robot’s greeting. This is a fairly simple piece of code that I hope to finish this weekend.

Next weekend, I hope to begin integration with Jade’s audio component. Hopefully, we can get a smooth communication protocol finished in the next week or two. After rethinking our project timeline with the new events, and considering how I’ve been jumping around with the different parts of the software component, I made some changes to the Gantt chart (as shown in the team status update). I am still on schedule, but without the first design demo, I can now take my time polishing the user program and making the templates. There are no major changes to the schedule and the only concern I have right now is integration, since my team and I are on opposite coasts.