Commonsense Reasoning

Knowledge that Everyone Knows

"People do not walk on their heads." The assertion comes about 900 statements deep into the 527,308 items that comprise the Open Mind common sense database. It's after "Laws are the rules of society" and before "The sky is blue during the day." This collection of mundane facts, which would take more than 20,000 pages to print out, consists entirely of statements so unremarkable they are barely worth stating. Most of us would correctly dismiss them as common sense.
- from the article, Guess who's smarter

Representation & Reasoning

Contents

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Good Starting Places

Publication

From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL

Our human dependence on common sense is very far-reaching. It comes into play with spoken and written language (as when we try to decipher someone's scratchy handwriting) and in our actions (e.g., when driving a car and deciding whether to brake or accelerate or swerve to avoid something).

Source

By Lenat, Douglas, 1998

General Readings

AI in the News

Why Watson won't make humanity obsolete -- yet

 Despite Watson's tremendous performance, the Final Jeopardy question at the end of Tuesday night's airing revealed the Achilles' heel that computer scientists have known all along: Watson doesn't really "think" anything, and it struggles with simple questions that most humans can answer without a second thought. Most of the clues on the "Jeopardy" board mention proper nouns -- specific places, events, people, songs, books and so on, says Dr. Douglas Lenat, a machine learning pioneer, former Stanford professor of computer science and CEO of Cycorp, a company that develops semantic technologies. But if that date had been part of the clue, could Watson correctly pick out [Schubert's] maternal grandmother's birth date from a list where only one of the dates was earlier than 1797?" We could, because we understand that everyone is younger than their own mother and grandmother, but Watson is unable to understand this, Lenat explained.

Source

Feb 17 2011, By Silverman, Matt
Watson
Publication

A veritable cognitive mind

"Marvin Minsky, MIT professor and AI's founding father, says today's artificial-intelligence methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains but still miss the 'big' AI problem. Indeed, according to Minsky, the missing element is something so big that we can't see it: common sense. 'To me the problem is how to get common sense into computers,' said Minsky. 'And part of that, it seems to me, is not how to solve any particular problem but how to quickly think of a new way to solve it-perhaps through a change in emotional state-when the usual method doesn't work.' In his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context of discovering that missing cognitive glue.... Reasoning by analogy is a way of adapting old knowledge, which almost never perfectly matches the present situation, by following a recipe of detecting differences and tweaking parameters. It all happens so quickly that no 'thinking' seems to be involved."

Source

Jul 28 2003, By Johnson, R. Colin
Minsky
Publication

Guess who's smarter

"People do not walk on their heads." The assertion comes about 900 statements deep into the 527,308 items that comprise the Open Mind common sense database. It's after "Laws are the rules of society" and before "The sky is blue during the day." This collection of mundane facts, which would take more than 20,000 pages to print out, consists entirely of statements so unremarkable they are barely worth stating. Most of us would correctly dismiss them as common sense.

Source

May 26 2003, By D.C. Denison

Organizations

Link

Commonsense Reasoning, the organization

Commonsense Reasoning is a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering and promoting research in the field of formal commonsense reasoning.

Its primary activities are:

  • organizing the biennial international Commonsense Symposium, the premier forum for researchers to share and disseminate technical advances in the field of formal commonsense reasoning
  • advancing progress in the development of formal models for commonsense reasoning through education and publication

Source

Educational Resources

Publication

Representations of Commonsense Knowledge

A full book, available for free in PDF form.

From the preface:

A major problem in artificial intelligence is to endow computers with commonsense knowledge of the world and with the ability to use that knowledge sensibly. A large body of research has studied this problem through careful analysis of typical examples of reasoning in a variety of commonsense domains. The immediate aim of this research is to develop a rich language for expressing commonsense knowledge, and inference techniques for carrying out commonsense reasoning. This book provides an introduction and a survey of this body of research. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book to attempt this.

The book is designed to be used as a textbook for a one-semester graduate course on knowledge representation.

Source

By Davis, Ernest, 1990
classic, text book

News

AI in the News

Why Watson won't make humanity obsolete -- yet

 Despite Watson's tremendous performance, the Final Jeopardy question at the end of Tuesday night's airing revealed the Achilles' heel that computer scientists have known all along: Watson doesn't really "think" anything, and it struggles with simple questions that most humans can answer without a second thought. Most of the clues on the "Jeopardy" board mention proper nouns -- specific places, events, people, songs, books and so on, says Dr. Douglas Lenat, a machine learning pioneer, former Stanford professor of computer science and CEO of Cycorp, a company that develops semantic technologies. But if that date had been part of the clue, could Watson correctly pick out [Schubert's] maternal grandmother's birth date from a list where only one of the dates was earlier than 1797?" We could, because we understand that everyone is younger than their own mother and grandmother, but Watson is unable to understand this, Lenat explained.

Source

Feb 17 2011, By Silverman, Matt
Watson

Classic Articles & Books

Pages

Publication

Representations of Commonsense Knowledge

A full book, available for free in PDF form.

From the preface:

A major problem in artificial intelligence is to endow computers with commonsense knowledge of the world and with the ability to use that knowledge sensibly. A large body of research has studied this problem through careful analysis of typical examples of reasoning in a variety of commonsense domains. The immediate aim of this research is to develop a rich language for expressing commonsense knowledge, and inference techniques for carrying out commonsense reasoning. This book provides an introduction and a survey of this body of research. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book to attempt this.

The book is designed to be used as a textbook for a one-semester graduate course on knowledge representation.

Source

By Davis, Ernest, 1990
classic, text book
Publication

Commonsense Reasoning about Causality

This was one of three AIJ papers that started the field of qualitative reasoning,  but I regard it as being superceded by the 1986 paper and my 1994 book.  (B.Kuipers)

 

This paper presents a qualitative-reasoning method for predicting the behavior of mechanisms chracterized by continuous, time-varying parameters. The structure of a mechanism is described in terms of a set of parameters and the constraints that hold among them: essentially a `qualitative differential equation'. The qualitative-behavior description consists of a discrete set of time-points, at which the values of the parameters are described in terms of ordinal relations and directions of change. The behvaioral description, or envisionment, is derived by two sets of rules: propagation rules which elaborate the description of the current time-point, and prediction rules which determine what is known about the next qualitatively distinct state of the mechanism. A detailed example shows how the envisionment method can detect a previously unsuspected landmark point at which the system is in stable equilibrium.

Source

By Kuipers, B., 1994
classic
Publication

Commonsense arithmetic reasoning

Source

By Simmons R. , 1986
classic
Publication

Programs with common sense

This is the first clear call for the separation of knowledge and inference procedure in AI.  In this paper McCarthy advocates using predicate logic as a declarative representation of knowledge and first-order logic as the inference procedure.Additional notes on this landmark paper at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html.Bar-Hilel's comments in the discussion section from the conference are also interesting:"PROF. Y. BAR-HILLEL: Dr. McCarthy's paper belongs in the Journal of Half-Baked Ideas, the creation of which was recently proposed by Dr. I. J. Good. Dr. McCarthy will probably be the first to admit this. Before he goes on to bake his ideas fully, it might be well to give him some advice and raise some objections. He himself mentions some possible objections, but I do not think that he treats them with the full consideration they deserve; there are others he does not mention.For lack of time, I shall not go into the first part of his paper, although I think that it contains a lot of highly unclear philosophical, or pseudo-philosophical assumptions. I shall rather spend my time in commenting on the example he works out in his paper at some length. Before I start, let me voice my protest against the general assumption of Dr. McCarthy -- slightly caricatured -- that a machine, if only its program is specified with a sufficient degree of carelessness, will be able to carry out satisfactory even rather difficult tasks."

Source

By McCarthy, J., 1960,
classic
Publication

Artificial Intelligence, Logic and Formalizing Common Sense

Source

By McCarthy, John, 1989
classic
Publication

Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the CYC Project

Source

By Lenat, D. B. and Guha, R. V. , 1990
classic

Pages

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