Applications are increasingly expected to make smart decisions based on what humans consider basic commonsense. An often overlooked but essential form of commonsense involves comparisons, e.g. the fact that bears are typically more dangerous than dogs, that tables are heavier than chairs, or that ice is colder than water. In this paper, we first rely on open information extraction methods to obtain large amounts of comparisons from the Web. We then develop a joint optimization model for cleaning and disambiguating this knowledge with respect to WordNet. This model relies on integer linear programming and semantic coherence scores. Experiments show that our model outperforms strong baselines and allows us to obtain a large knowledge base of disambiguated commonsense assertions.

We study disambiguating of pronoun references in Winograd Schemas, which are part of the Winograd Schema Challenge, a proposed replacement for the Turing test. In particular we consider sentences where the pronoun can be resolved to both antecedents without semantic violations in world knowledge, that means for both readings of the sentence there is a possible consistent world. Nevertheless humans will strongly prefer one answer, which can be explained by pragmatic effects described in Relevance Theory. We state formal optimization criteria based on principles of Relevance Theory in a simplification of Roger Schank’s graph framework for natural language understanding. We perform experiments using Answer Set Programming and report the usefulness of our criteria for disambiguation and their sensitivity to parameter variations.

The problem of replicating the flexibility of human common-sense reasoning has captured the imagination of computer scientists since the early days of Alan Turing's foundational work on computation and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. In the intervening years, the idea of cognition as computation has emerged as a fundamental tenet of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. But what kind of computation is cognition? We describe a computational formalism centered around a probabilistic Turing machine called QUERY, which captures the operation of probabilistic conditioning via conditional simulation. Through several examples and analyses, we demonstrate how the QUERY abstraction can be used to cast common-sense reasoning as probabilistic inference in a statistical model of our observations and the uncertain structure of the world that generated that experience. This formulation is a recent synthesis of several research programs in AI and cognitive science, but it also represents a surprising convergence of several of Turing's pioneering insights in AI, the foundations of computation, and statistics.

One of the challenges to information extraction is the requirement of human annotated examples. Current successful approaches alleviate this problem by employing some form of distant supervision i.e., look into knowledge bases such as Freebase as a source of supervision to create more examples. While this is perfectly reasonable, most distant supervision methods rely on a hand coded background knowledge that explicitly looks for patterns in text. In this work, we take a different approach -- we create weakly supervised examples for relations by using commonsense knowledge. The key innovation is that this commonsense knowledge is completely independent of the natural language text. This helps when learning the full model for information extraction as against simply learning the parameters of a known CRF or MLN. We demonstrate on two domains that this form of weak supervision yields superior results when learning structure compared to simply using the gold standard labels.

Commonsense reasoning at scale is a core problem for cognitive systems. In this paper, we discuss two ways in which heuristic graph traversal methods can be used to generate plausible inference chains. First, we discuss how Cyc’s predicate-type hierarchy can be used to get reasonable answers to queries. Second, we explain how connection graph-based techniques can be used to identify script-like structures. Finally, we demonstrate through experiments that these methods lead to significant improvement in accuracy for both Q/A and script construction.

Our aim is to compute the minimal data-set implied by the assertions of the English language, extract it from the database, and store it in files of our own format. Towards this direction we read the table of assertions (conceptnet assertion) and keep the entries that have their language id set to en. According to Table A.1 in Appendix A, every assertion is associated with entries from the database tables conceptnet concept (Table A.2), conceptnet relation (Table A.3), nl frequency (Table A.4), conceptnet frame (Table A.5), conceptnet surfaceform (Table A.6), and conceptnet rawassertion (Table A.7). Through conceptnet rawassertion the assertions are also associated with the actual sentences which are located in the table corpus sentence (Table A.6). Moreover, we do not need any other table from the database, as the important entries from all the above tables are contained in among these tables. It turns out that reading once the assertions and then all the entries referenced from the assertions in the English language is not enough to produce a minimal consistent data-set. Section 1.1 explains why, and gives a high-level overview of the process that we follow in order to compute the closure of the data-set implied by the assertions of the English language. However, before we describe these reasons we mention which fields we are going to keep from each table of the original ConceptNet 4 database.

On Implementing Usual Values Ronald R. Yager Machine Intelligence Institute Iona College New Rochelle, N. Y. 10801 Abstract In many cases commonsense knowledge consists of knowledge of what is usual. In this paper we develop a system for reasoning with usual information. This system is based upon the fact that these pieces of commonsense information involve both a probabilistic aspect and a granular aspect. We implement this system with the aid of possibility-probability granules. Introduction An ability to handle commonsense reasoning is a crucial need in the development of the artificial intelligence [1].

The process of diagnosis involves learning about the state of a system from various observations of symptoms or findings about the system. Sophisticated Bayesian (and other) algorithms have been developed to revise and maintain beliefs about the system as observations are made. Nonetheless, diagnostic models have tended to ignore some common sense reasoning exploited by human diagnosticians; In particular, one can learn from which observations have not been made, in the spirit of conversational implicature. There are two concepts that we describe to extract information from the observations not made. First, some symptoms, if present, are more likely to be reported before others. Second, most human diagnosticians and expert systems are economical in their data-gathering, searching first where they are more likely to find symptoms present. Thus, there is a desirable bias toward reporting symptoms that are present. We develop a simple model for these concepts that can significantly improve diagnostic inference.

At one of those conferences, I met John. Stanford moved toward a computer science department under the leadership of George Forsythe, John suggested to George, and then supported, the idea of hiring me into the founding faculty of the department. Since we were both Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) contract awardees, we quickly formed a close bond concerning ARPA-sponsored AI research and graduate student teaching. And the joint intelligence of both of us was quickly deployed in a very rapid and, in retrospect, brilliant decision to hire Les Earnest to be the executive officer of the new Stanford AI Lab that ARPA supported. John McCarthy's first breakthrough paper was his 1958 Teddington Symposium paper on programs with commonsense reasoning abilities.

Contextual knowledge is essential in answering questions given specific observations. While recent approaches to building commonsense knowledge basesvia text mining and/or crowdsourcing are successful,contextual knowledge is largely missing. To addressthis gap, this paper presents SocialExplain, a novel approach to acquiring contextual commonsense knowledge from explanations of social content. The acquisition process is broken into two cognitively simple tasks:to identify contextual clues from the given social content, and to explain the content with the clues. An experiment was conducted to show that multiple piecesof contextual commonsense knowledge can be identi-fied from a small number of tweets. Online users verified that 92.45% of the acquired sentences are good,and 95.92% are new sentences compared with existingcrowd-sourced commonsense knowledge bases.