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TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/topic_words.py
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 e5617b86ba Replace clustering with a catalogue, and hand-write the references to judge it against
The pipeline's embed-and-cluster step is dead, and this commit holds both the
evidence for that and the step proposed to replace it.

Predicaments. Scenes are re-described as "what the person is up against", with
no names, jobs or places, then embedded and clustered (redescribe.py,
topic_words.py, topic_share.py). The pilot chose qwen3:14b over 3b by reading
both side by side. Two defects the pilot exposed are fixed: split.py missed
titles in quotes and a contents subtitle after a dash, so three stories had been
merged into their neighbours, and strip_names.py read New York place names as
people. The corrected corpus is probe/v2 (97 stories, 839 scenes);
carry_summaries.py reuses the 829 unchanged v1 summaries. Topic share fell from
20% to 13% at k=60, short of the pre-registered 10%.

Hand references. Three corpora were read scene by scene and written up by hand,
under the same prompt rules the local models get, as a baseline to judge them
against: O. Henry (probe/v2/claude, 839 scenes, 20 situations), Wharton's
Descent of Man (probe/wharton, 262 scenes, 16 groups) and Jacobs's The Lady of
the Barge (probe/jacobs, 157 scenes, 19 groups). Each has its own README and a
readable page. No inference was used for any of them.

Catalogue. probe/catalogue maps every hand group in the three references onto 36
situation entries, with an answer key per corpus and one recurrence rule applied
to all three. classify.py assigns a scene one entry or none, leave-one-corpus-
out; score.py checks it against the key, with a self-test on random labels.

Why clustering is out: hand-written predicaments, embedded and clustered exactly
as the model's were, agree with the hand grouping at ARI 0.05 — no better than
the 14B text's 0.07. Better rewriting cannot rescue it. Embeddings cannot even
shortlist: the hand label is the nearest entry 13% of the time and in the top 8
half the time.

The classification runs are not here. The dev and test runs are pre-registered
in probe/catalogue/README.md with the bar set beforehand, and are blocked on the
inference host, whose GPU has fallen off the PCIe bus three times. The 30-scene
partial output in out/ is not a result.

Review page. The situation review is now a browser page rather than JSON edited
by hand (review_page.py, review_page_logic.cjs with Node tests, format schema
v2). It has never been rendered in a real browser.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014BygvsUXV9eU6oHkTCkKZ1
2026-09-20 17:19:42 -04:00

22 lines
1.2 KiB
Python

"""Words that tie a scene to a topic: who is in it and where it happens.
The first human review found the summary groups were topics (artists, police, courtship,
hotels) rather than situations. These words are how that is measured, and how leakage into
re-described predicaments is caught. A fixed list: it only has to catch the common cases.
"""
from review_page import ROLE_WORDS
PLACE_WORDS = set("""
hotel restaurant cafe café saloon bar store shop office park street square church theatre theater
stage farm ranch camp mine court courtroom jail cell station train boat ship ferry house room flat
apartment tenement boardinghouse mansion factory laundry bakery kitchen table dinner lunch breakfast
party wedding ball club casino studio gallery magazine newspaper bank
""".split())
# Words for a person with no role at all. "A man" is not a topic; the first baseline had a group
# scored 90% topic-bound for saying "man", so these are left out of the measure (still offered as
# role hints on the review page). Fixed before any predicament was generated.
GENERIC_PEOPLE = {'man', 'woman', 'girl', 'boy', 'child', 'worker', 'stranger', 'friend'}
TOPIC_WORDS = (ROLE_WORDS - GENERIC_PEOPLE) | PLACE_WORDS