Part 4: Declaring Actions and Properties

Previous: Declaring Nouns

This is the sentence we are going to focus on in this section:

We already have the crow, the tree branch, the cheese, the beak and the fox. Let's head over to the Timelines panel (use the "Timelines" button on the top of the main editor to get there). Here's what you get:

Nice gradients, no? I kind of like them. Here's what's going on:

• • The Timeline. The big blue bar represents the enduring march of time, linear and infinite (at least in the forward, or future-facing direction). We can add an arbitrary number of Story Points that represent instants in time (states). We add as many as we need. A Story Point represents an arbitrarily small moment of time. Nothing actually takes place at a Story Point. Instead, everything in the story takes place in the intervals between Story Points. Actions can overlap; for example, I may be walking down the street in the interval between Story Points "2" and "6", and thinking about my purpose in life between Story Points 1 and 4 (partially overlapping). Note, too, that there is no meaning to Story Point numbers except that they are sequential, like slide numbers in PowerPoint or another presentation tool. They don't represent days, or minutes, or hours, and there is no way right now in Scheherazade to define the lengths of real-world time that transpire in the intervals between Story Points. All that really matters in our representation of a timeline is the interval logic: what actions take place over what spans, and how they relate to each other.

• The buttons along the bottom let you insert or delete Story Points. Think of this as like inserting or deleting slides in the presentation tool. In that case, you have a linear sequence of slides, and you can insert new slides in the middle, and all the slides afterward are renumbered. Here, if you add a new Story Point prior to Story Point 1, you'll make a new Story Point 1, and what was Story Point 1 becomes Story Point 2. Alternatively, you can click the + button after Story Point 1, and a new Story Point 2 will be created and appended to the timeline. You can create as many Story Points as you like. Try it out; it's kind of satisfying to make a bunch and then delete them. Sometimes during the more tedious nights of working on my dissertation, I would pass the time by creating and deleting hundreds of Story Points, over and over, watching time dilate and compress, seeing the ether of existence proliferate and wither, acting like the sand-castle builder and the sum of the ocean's renewing waves alike.... Just kidding, that would have been rather desperate of me.

  • The "Display Options" button in the top left can control some cosmetic features that won't make sense until we make a few actions.

  • The story timeline has a name: Reality. More to the point, this is the Reality timeline. There are other lines of time, you ask? Well, there are if you construct them. For example, we can model imaginary actions, like fears and hopes, as alternate timelines, and then attach them to Reality. We'll get to do that soon for "The Fox and the Crow." (See? Even that, there, was an alternate timeline. I conceived of an imaginary event to take place at some future point in time in which we demonstrate how model alternate timelines in Scheherazade. I then referred to that hypothetical future in the clause "We'll get to do that soon". Will we actually do it soon? Maybe, maybe not. But it's a real event within the alternate scope of time [or, if you prefer, an imaginary event in the Reality scope of time] and so it belongs in a symbolic encoding of my meaning.)

  • Finally, two buttons allow you to create new content: New Action and New Property.

    • Action corresponds to a dynamic verb, i.e., something progressive that looks different throughout the interval (like taking a seat)

    • Property corresponds to a stative verb, i.e., a state of being that is static throughout the interval (like sitting)

That's enough text for now. Let's get back to pictures. While Story Point 1 is still highlighted (red), click on New Property.

The Timelines screen is taken over by this form-filling panel. It should feel pretty familiar by now; it uses the same underlying code as the noun-defining panel we used earlier. The difference is that instead of defining a new noun, we are defining a new Property and putting it on the timeline. A new Property or Action will be attached to the Story Point that was selected when you first clicked New Action or New Property, in this case Story Point 1.

A note on terminology: You'll usually see "property" but sometimes you will see "condition" for obscure reasons. They are interchangeable. For example, the accept button banner here reads "Something begins to have some condition", i.e., there is some Property that is as yet undefined. When we define the Property, the banner will pop up into a clickable accept button, just like in the case of nouns earlier.

There is a difference compared to earlier, though, and that is the "Negate" button. Try it out: Our placeholder is now negated.

We don't really want to negate this Property, though, so click the Negate button again to restore the original positive assertion of "some condition".

Notice that the question being asked is: "What is the property beginning?" (Emphasis mine.) Even though Properties are stative, they still have beginning points and end points. The phrasing of this question is just to emphasize that we are actually modeling the onset of a Property, which you can think of as a special kind of Action (in that it is state-changing). At Story Point 0, the Property does not hold; by Story Point 1, it has commenced.

Now, what is the stative Property we are trying to model? Ah yes, the crow's sitting on the tree branch. Try typing "sitting" in the Property search panel:

Great -- It's there. Actually, it's there twice. You'll sometimes see these redundancies as Scheherazade uses a motley crew of data sources to populate its database. Sometimes they overlap. In this case, we have from one data source "sitting" as the progressive form of "seated", and from another an adjective "sitting". Let's choose the former because it's a more grammatical.

Now the accept button banner can be a bit more specific and say: "Something begins to be sitting." (Awkwardly phrased, but technically correct given how we are modeling this.)

Just like in the case of the meronymous noun "the branch of the tree", here we have a nested form in a blue box that represents the Property that is beginning. It asks if "the property is true". But wait, you say, don't we implicitly ask that with the "negate" button? Well, the "negate" button refers to the onset action, where the "property true?" dropdown refers instead to the property itself. In other words, four combinations are possible:

• • the crow sits

  • the crow begins to not sit

  • the crow doesn't sit

  • the crow doesn't begin to not sit

At first blush, this seems rather redundant semantically, but it can be useful to have this distinction in certain cases that are less clear-cut than sitting. Consider the difference between "the trader didn't become rich" and "the trader became not rich". The semantics are quite different. For the same reason, the "is the property true?" dropdown also allows for degrees: one can model that the trader became extremely rich, somewhat rich, very not rich, and so on.

In this case, let's leave the property true and the onset non-negated.

There is one last red prompt button: "Click to select: What is sitting?" Clicking that presents a picker that should be familiar. We can select all the various things that can begin to sit in Story Point 1 of our encoded fable:

Select "the crow", and the Property is ready to go:

Note how the answer to the prompt "What is sitting?" is now labeled where the prompt button used to be: "the crow".

But don't hit the accept button yet! There's one more thing to do. We want to make sure to mark what part of the original text we are modeling. It will make our annotation that much richer to have each symbolic predicate (like this property) linked with the clause in the original story whence it came. Over in the Original Story box, click your mouse/trackpad button on the first word "A" and hold the button down as you move you pointer over to "sitting":

Release the mouse button, and Scheherazade will highlight the span in red:

Now click the accept button on the property panel. You've now created the property and associated it with the span of text above. You should see the span go from red to tan, and you should see your new property appear below the timeline:

As you click around the Timeline, the actions and properties that start or end at that Story Point appear in the space below the timeline. Here, because the act of sitting starts at Story Point 1, we see "The crow begins to be sitting." We'll talk about those controls on the right momentarily. Here is how the text panels look now:

The Original Story panel now has the sentence we have already modeled highlighted in tan; this gives you a sense of how much of the story you have already encoded. The Reconstructed Story panel has gone from empty to a reading of our entire story as we've modeled it symbolically. It's not much so far, just the one predicate we've set up. But eventually it will be a machine reading of a large semantic network that represents our reading of the fable.

Now, about those five control buttons to the right of the sentence in the Story Point area:

• • The i button is for information. It tells you a little bit of information about how you set up that sentence. Here, it tells us that "The crow begins to be sitting" is "a continuous property that begins here and doesn't stop", i.e., the crow starts to sit in Story Point 1, and never stops sitting. (Thrilling story! Better than Cats!)

  • The + button lets us add a modifier. We'll do that momentarily to talk about the crow in the beak.

  • The paper-and-pencil icon is for edit. If you click it, the form creation panel re-appears with all the slots pre-filled as we filled them out earlier. If you want to change the "crow sit" property, you can hit edit, make your changes, then click the accept button again. Note that you can also add a new Original Story span or change the span using the edit button. There isn't anything telling you this in the interface, but if you select a new span while editing an action or property, you'll create a new association when you click the accept button again.

• The triangle button lets you move an action or property to a different Story Point.

• The X lets you delete an action or property.

Let's first tackle that modifier. Hit the + button and you'll see a new form-filling panel, this one for modifier predicates. Here, you can specify that the crow sat heavily, or regretfully, or some other way. Instead of searching for something, just click the triangle next to the "Prepositional Phrases" and you'll find one tasty option:

Click that "on/around/over/etc. something" option and you'll see a few slots:

Now I can see that you've gotten the hang of filling out these form slots, so I'll go a bit faster now. Please:

• • Select "on" for the preposition

  • Select "the branch of the tree" for the object of the preposition (don't forget to click on the red prompt button first)

  • Highlight "on a branch of a tree" in the Original Story

  • Click the accept button

You should now see a modifier dutifully placed in the Story Point area:

And an inclusion of the tree branch in the Reconstructed Story:

That's a bit better. But, there's still something quite weird about the tense. The original story has the past progressive "A crow was sitting" -- something that began prior to the telling of the story -- but the Reconstructed Story says "A crow began to be sitting", which (to say nothing of the very odd syntactic construction) begins its telling at moment the crow sat. Only the Reconstructed Story narrates the act of sitting; the Original Story simply implies it as the crow's being in a sitting position is simply given as the opening state of the world.

Good thing Scheherazade supports Opening Story Points.

Press the triangle ("Play") button next to the property below the timeline to move the property. You'll see a window like this:

Under the dropdown, you'll see the option "Opening Story Point" -- note that this Story Point appears to the left of Story Point 1, as the first Story Point in the timeline. When you select Opening Story Point in this window, the property will move over there, so you'll see this:

Much better, no? Scheherazade will treat all content in the Opening Story Point as a priori with respect to its narration of the story. The crow simply "was sitting" in both tellings, the original and the reconstructed one. I bet someone looking at these two windows would have figured you typed stuff in the Reconstructed Story box itself, but in fact, you created a symbolic encoding of the first sentence of the story that links into formal ontologies with temporal, modal and propositional annotation. Neat, huh?

Well, let's not get carried away. It's just the first sentence. But you are now getting the hang of how to use Scheherazade's Timelines screen.

One more thing in this section: Let's pretend that for some reason we need to stop a property span. (In this case, the crow never stops sitting, but hey.) The Display Options button on the top lets you vary this screen a bit; one of the things you can do is hide or show actions and properties that are "continuing" during a Story Point (as opposed to starting or ending). See, if you click back to Story Point 1 now, it'll be blank, since the sitting action was moved over to the Opening Story Point. But if you use Display Options to show continuing content:

You'll see the "sitting" action represented in Story Point 1 as something ongoing:

Hit that octogonal stop button to insert a new action in this Story Point for a cessation of an action or property.

Of course that syntax "stopped being sitting" is twisted, but in this case it's correct with respect to how we've modeled the sit behavior (as a property). In a parallel universe, we could have also modeled the first sentence of the fable with "something sits" as an action, rather than "sitting" as a property. Semantically, this is not as correct, because it implies that the crow has been lowering herself onto the tree branch really slowly. But for the sake of argument, let's see how we would have done that.

Go back to the Opening Story Point and hit New Action. Search for the action "sits". You'll see a list of action types that contain the word "sits":

Select the one called "something sits awayFrom/near/on/toward something". Note that the prepositional phrase, in this case, is built in. (That's thanks to the high detail of our data source for verb frames, VerbNet.) You'll see three slots that need filling this time:

• • For "Who or what is sitting", click on the prompt button and then select the crow.

  • For the preposition, select "on".

  • For the destination, select the branch of the tree.

  • For the Original Story span, highlight "A crow was sitting on the branch of a tree." (It's okay to have two different predicates associated with the same span of source text.)

Click the accept button and you'll see both ways of modeling this sentence, side by side:

Note that in the Story Point area, pink denotes actions and that blue/green hue denotes properties.

Head back to Story Point 1 and "stop" the action there just like you had stopped the property span. You'll see a syntactic reconstruction that's cleaner, though as I mentioned above, not quite the same semantically.

We have both variations set up at once, explaining the redundancies; still, you can see how the property approach and the action approach resulted in slightly different clauses. You might ask yourself, what's important about the crow's opening disposition: the fact that she was sitting, or the fact that she had to sit to get there? Like that of the existence of free will, this debate has raged for centuries and a consensus view may never see the light of day.

You can delete whichever one you don't like.

Don't forget to save your story often.

Next: Embedded Actions and Alternate Timelines