A cookbook of translating English to Xapi

The Xapagy cognitive architecture had been designed to perform narrative reasoning: to model and mimic the activities performed by humans when witnessing, reading, recalling, narrating and talking about stories. Xapagy communicates with the outside world using Xapi, a simplified, “pidgin” language which is strongly tied to the internal representation model (instances, scenes and verb instances) and reasoning techniques (shadows and headless shadows). While not fully a semantic equivalent of natural language, Xapi can represent a wide range of complex stories. We illustrate the representation technique used in Xapi through examples taken from folk physics, folk psychology as well as some more unusual literary examples. We argue that while the Xapi model represents a conceptual shift from the English representation, the mapping is logical and consistent, and a trained knowledge engineer can translate between English and Xapi at near-native speed.