Summary of the ALFRED 2.0 Project

ALFRED 1.0 was a universal interfacing agent that accepted a very small set of English sentences and translated them into commands appropriate for different domains. ALFRED itself had no parsing capacity (parsing was conducted by an outside, off-the-shelf system), and its knowledge of language in general was extremely limited. It basically searched for keywords in an input string and matched them up to possible domain commands. ALFRED 2.0 is the next generation of this interfacing agent. ALFRED 2.0, like its predecessor, is written in Alma. Alma is a Prolog-like, declarative language (Alma itself is written in Prolog). What makes Alma unique is its step-by-step reasoning. Alma keeps track of time by counting off steps (or time units). Each step in a derivation must correspond to an Alma step. For instance, at step 1, Alma can accept that P, P -> Q, and Q -> R is true. Then each step in the derivation of R takes a time step: