Hi Lycha,
Good to hear from you!
Robert Medeksza is also aware of the databases such as the one you describe. The databases allow a word to be categorized as part of speech, and act as a sort of super-thesaurus, providing all the categories of related words, and lists of those words.
Zabaware is planning to use such a database in the upcoming 5.0 release (which is turning out to have QUITE a lot of new features!) to give Hal at least two new abilities:
1. The ability to substitute synonyms into sentences when paraphrasing the user, remembering old subjects, and constructing new sentences, thus increasing variety.
2. The ability to identify the prominent idea, subject, or thesis of a remark, in order to categorize it better in Hal's databases for future retrieval.
As you know, many words depend on context both for meaning, and for what part of speech they represent. Consider the word "fast." You can be fast friends, have a fast car, glue something fast to the wall, fast for a day to lose weight, and be in fast company.
Hal already has routines to sometimes infer part-of-speech and meaning from sentence position (as described in postings above), so I foresee Hal continuing to use those routines, and gradually utilizing the new databases more and more, as better and better ideas occur to Hal's developers.
Great question! Have a terrific day!
Sincerely,
Don
