Promise Detection and KB Sync

These examples and illustrative results are independently authored teaching materials, not measured model results.

Use case

Extract tasks from a meeting transcript. Teaching line 12 has Lin saying “I will submit the test report on Friday”; line 18 has Wang saying “If I have time, I will consider more testing”; line 21 quotes an old promise. Only explicit new commitments directly become candidate actions.

Mechanism

Identify speaker and current commitment context, then extract owner, action, scope, stated date and location. Mark missing dates unknown; resolve relative dates only with meeting-date context while retaining original wording. Exclude hypotheticals, quotations and withdrawn commitments. Compare owner/action/scope with existing tasks for duplicates. Produce reviewable candidates and write back only under existing authorization and confirmed scope, retaining evidence.

Bad example

Add every “I will” sentence to TODO, assign Friday when no date is given, and write everything into the knowledge base.

Good example

Extract candidates from this transcript: Lin’s line 12 report is explicit; conditional consideration at line 18 and the old quote at line 21 are not new tasks. Record owner, action, stated date and location with unknown missing values, then deduplicate against existing tasks. Write back only authorized, evidence-supported updates; keep ambiguous entries pending confirmation.

Why the change matters

Commitment detection depends on context and responsibility rather than keywords. Evidence locations and missing-value handling make updates traceable; existing-task comparison prevents duplicates or overwriting different scopes.

Observable expectation

The teaching candidate contains only Lin’s report, retaining Friday and its meeting-date interpretation. Record reasons for excluding the other lines. Add an explicit “I will submit the attachment” with no date: it becomes a candidate with unknown date. Every item traces to a statement; no date is invented.

Limits

No frozen source is confirmed for this entry, so this is not a repository-validated workflow. Ambiguous, delegated and changed commitments need confirmation; external write-back requires task-scope authorization. With insufficient records, output candidates without creating obligations from model inference.