DAYDREAMER is a cognitive architecture that models the human stream of thought and its triggering and direction by emotions, as in human daydreaming. DAYDREAMER includes: daydreaming goals: strategies for what to think about; emotional control of thought: triggering and direction of processing by emotions; hierarchical planning: achieving a goal by breaking it down into subgoals; analogical planning (chunking): storing successful plans and adapting them to future problems; episode indexing and retrieval: mechanisms for indexing and retrieval of cases; serendipity detection and application: a...

What would it be like to speak fluent French? Is there a single moment when the language finally clicks and you understand it? When can you speak it? How long does it take? Once you can understand and speak it, does it feel as natural as English? The author wanted to find out the answers to these questions, so he moved to Paris. As he learned to speak French fluently, he kept this record of his experiences and perceptions. Included are French words and expressions, comparisons between French and English, fine points of French, and answers to the above questions.

ThoughtTreasure is a commonsense knowledge base and architecture for natural language processing. It uses multiple representations including logic, finite automata, grids, and scripts. The ThoughtTreasure architecture consists of: the text agency, containing text agents for recognizing words, phrases, and names, and mechanisms for learning new words and inflections; the syntactic component, containing a syntactic parser, base rules, and filters; the semantic component, containing a semantic parser for producing a surface-level understanding of a sentence, a natural language generator, and an...