Adding a new property

ADAM provides some properties and colors to use in your curricula. However, you may need additional properties for your experiments. Adding new properties is straightforward. There are only two main steps. First, you must define an ontology type for the property. Second, you must tell ADAM how to describe the property in whatever languages you use for your experiment.

In this tutorial, we’re going to add a rubber property and a cyan color to show off the processes. We might use this rubber property, for example, on the existing BALL object.

Adding a binary property

First, we’ll add our rubber property. To do this, we’ll start by defining the ontology type. ADAM uses these ontology types as a tool for creating curricula. Note that the learner does not observe or interact with these ontology types at all.

To define our rubber property’s ontology type, we simply create an ontology node with the BINARY property that subtypes PERCEIVABLE_PROPERTY:

RUBBER = OntologyNode("rubber", [BINARY])
subtype(RUBBER, PERCEIVABLE_PROPERTY)

Note

ADAM also supports properties that learners can’t perceive. For example, EDIBLE is such a property. Such properties simply subtype PROPERTY directly.

Next, we must tell ADAM how to describe the property. To do this, we’ll need to edit the lexicon for the language(s) we’re using. By default, ADAM supports English and Chinese. The corresponding lexicons are defined in adam.language_specific.english.english_phase1_lexicon and adam.language_specific.chinese.chinese_phase1_lexicon, respectively. These define mappings from ontology nodes (as defined in the previous section) to lexicon entries, which tell ADAM how to describe the corresponding thing.

Our English lexicon entry for rubber will look like this:

LexiconEntry("rubber", ADJECTIVE)

We’ll add it to the lexicon, GAILA_PHASE_1_ENGLISH_LEXICON, between FLY and RED:

GAILA_PHASE_1_ENGLISH_LEXICON = OntologyLexicon(
    ontology=GAILA_PHASE_1_ONTOLOGY,
    ontology_node_to_word=(
        ...
        (FLY, LexiconEntry("fly", VERB, verb_form_sg3_prs="flies")),
        (RUBBER, LexiconEntry("rubber", ADJECTIVE)),
        (RED, LexiconEntry("red", ADJECTIVE)),
        ...
    ),
)

Finally, because we want balls to be made of rubber, we’ll open up adam.ontology.phase1_ontology and add the RUBBER property to BALL:

BALL = OntologyNode(
    "ball",
    [CAN_FILL_TEMPLATE_SLOT, PERSON_CAN_HAVE, RUBBER, ROLLABLE, RED, BLUE, GREEN, BLACK, WHITE],
)
subtype(BALL, INANIMATE_OBJECT)

That’s it! Now we have a rubber property and we’ve applied it to balls.

Adding a color

Second, we’ll add our cyan color property. Adding colors is nearly as easy as adding binary properties. There’s only one additional step: Defining the color’s RGB values.

We start off similarly with defining an ontology type, in this case for cyan:

CYAN = OntologyNode("cyan", [CAN_FILL_TEMPLATE_SLOT])
subtype(CYAN, COLOR)

Next, we need to add an entry to COLORS_TO_RGBS:

...
_CYAN_HEX = [(0, 255, 255)]  # (0, 254, 255)
COLORS_TO_RGBS: ImmutableDict[
    OntologyNode, Optional[Sequence[Tuple[int, int, int]]]
] = immutabledict(
    [
        ...
        (DARK_BROWN, _DARK_BROWN_HEX),
        (CYAN, _CYAN_HEX),
    ]
)

Finally, we’ll add a lexicon entry the same way we did for our rubber property. We’ll add our entry to GAILA_PHASE_1_ENGLISH_LEXICON after DARK_BROWN:

GAILA_PHASE_1_ENGLISH_LEXICON = OntologyLexicon(
    ontology=GAILA_PHASE_1_ONTOLOGY,
    ontology_node_to_word=(
        ...
        (DARK_BROWN, LexiconEntry("dark brown", ADJECTIVE)),
        (CYAN, LexiconEntry("cyan", ADJECTIVE)),
    ),
)

That’s it. You now have a cyan color property you can use in your experiments.

Conclusion

We have now added both the properties we set out to define: a binary property (rubber) and a color (cyan). Though ADAM does not and cannot include all possible properties, you should now be able to add any missing ones you need. I hope this tutorial has made the process clear.