The KNEXT system produces a large volume of factoids from text, expressing possibilistic general claims such as that 'A PERSON MAY HAVE A HEAD' or 'PEOPLE MAY SAY SOMETHING'. We present a rule-based method to sharpen certain classes of factoids into stronger, quantified claims such as 'ALL OR MOST PERSONS HAVE A HEAD' or 'ALL OR MOST PERSONS AT LEAST OCCASIONALLY SAY SOMETHING' -- statements strong enough to be used for inference. The judgement of whether and how to sharpen a factoid depends on the semantic categories of the terms involved and the strength of the quantifier depends on how strongly the subject is associated with what is predicated of it. We provide an initial assessment of the quality of such automatic strengthening of knowledge and examples of reasoning with multiple sharpened premises.

We believe that the flexibility and robustness of common sense reasoning comes from analogical reasoning, learning, and generalization operating over massive amounts of experience. Million-fact knowledge bases are a good starting point, but are likely to be orders of magnitude smaller, in terms of ground facts, than will be needed to achieve human-like common sense reasoning. This paper describes the FIRE reasoning engine which we have built to experiment with this approach. We discuss its knowledge base organization, including coarse-coding via mentions and a persistent TMS to achieve efficient retrieval while respecting the logical environment formed by contexts and their relationships in the KB. We describe its stratified reasoning organization, which supports both reflexive reasoning (Ask, Query) and deliberative reasoning (Solve, HTN planner). Analogical reasoning, learning, and generalization are supported as part of reflexive reasoning. To show the utility of these ideas, we describe how they are used in the Companion cognitive architecture, which has been used in a variety of reasoning and learning experiments.

We present an approach for acquiring common sense knowledge from social interaction. We argue that social common sense should be learned from daily interactions using implicit user's feedbacks and requires shared understanding of social situations. A service-oriented architecture, inspired from cognitive science, that foster mutual understanding between a smart environment and its inhabitants is presented. The method makes use of ConceptNet to work with common sense knowledge. We are able to successfully use and learn common sense knowledge.

Reasoning about Commonsense knowledge poses many problems that traditional logical inference doesn't handle well. Among these is cross-domain inference: how to draw on multiple independently produced knowledge bases. Since knowledge bases may not have the same vocabulary, level of detail, or accuracy, that inference should be "scruffy." The AnalogySpace technique showed that a factored inference approach is useful for approximate reasoning over noisy knowledge bases like ConceptNet. A straightforward extension of factored inference to multiple datasets, called Blending, has seen productive use for commonsense reasoning. We show that Blending is a kind of Collective Matrix Factorization (CMF): the factorization spreads out the prediction loss between each dataset. We then show that blending additional data causes the singular vectors to rotate between the two domains, which enables cross-domain inference. We show, in a simplified example, that the maximum interaction occurs when the magnitudes (as defined by the largest singular values) of the two matrices are equal, confirming previous empirical conclusions. Finally, we describe and mathematically justify Bridge Blending, which facilitates inference between datasets by specifically adding knowledge that "bridges" between the two, in terms of CMF.

By extending Cyc’s ontology and KB approximately 2%, Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) have built a system to answer clinical researchers’ ad hoc queries. The query may be long and complex, hence only partially understood at first, parsed into a set of CycL (higher-order logic) fragments with open variables. But, surprisingly often, after applying various constraints (medical domain knowledge, common sense, discourse pragmatics, syntax), there is only one single way to fit those fragments together, one semantically meaningful formal query P. The system, SRA (for Semantic Research Assistant), dispatches a series of database calls and then combines, logically and arithmetically, their results into answers to P. Seeing the first few answers stream back, the user may realize that they need to abort, modify, and re-ask their query. Even before they push ASK, just knowing approximately how many answers would be returned can spark such editing. Besides real-time ad hoc query-answering, queries can be bundled and persist over time. One bundle of 275 queries is rerun quarterly by CCF to produce the procedures and outcomes data it needs to report to STS (Society of Thoracic Surgeons, an external hospital accreditation and ranking body); another bundle covers ACC (American College of Cardiology) reporting. Until full articulation/answering of precise, analytical queries becomes as straight-forward and ubiquitous as text search, even partial understanding of a query empowers semantic search over semi-structured data (ontology-tagged text), avoiding many of the false positives and false negatives that standard text searching suffers from.

Much of the ongoing explosion of digital content is in the form of text. This content is a virtual gold-mine of information that can inform a range of social, governmental, and business decisions. For example, using content available on blogs and social networking sites businesses can find out what its customers are saying about their products and services. In the digital age where customer is king, the business value of ascertaining consumer sentiment cannot be overstated. People express sentiments in myriad ways. At times, they use simple, direct assertions, but most often they use sentences involving comparisons, conjunctions expressing multiple and possibly opposing sentiments about multiple features and entities,and pronominal references whose resolution requires discourse level context. Frequently people use abbreviations, slang, SMSese, idioms and metaphors. Understanding the latter also requires common sense reasoning. In this paper, we present iSEE, a fully implemented sentiment extraction engine, which makes use of statistical methods, classical NLU techniques, common sense reasoning, and probabilistic inference to extract entity and feature specific sentiment from complex sentences and dialog. Most of the components of iSEE are domain independent and the system can be generalized to new domains by simply adding domain relevant lexicons.

Good and generous knowledge sources, reliable and efficient induction patterns, and automatic and controllable quality assertion approaches are three critical issues to commonsense knowledge (CSK) acquisition. This paper employs Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS), a volunteers-contributed CSK database, to study the first and the third issues. For those stylized CSK, our result shows that over 40% of CSK for four predicate types in OMCS can be found in the web, which contradicts to the assumption that CSK is not communicated in texts. Moreover, we propose a commonsense knowledge classifier trained from OMCS, and achieve high precision in some predicate types, e.g., 82.6% in HasProperty. The promising results suggest new ways of analyzing and utilizing volunteer-contributed knowledge to design systems automatically mining commonsense knowledge from the web.

Present-day programs are brittle as computers are notoriously lacking in common sense. While significant progress has been made in building large common sense knowledge bases, they are intrinsically incomplete and inconsistent. This paper presents a novel approach to bridging the gaps between multiple knowledge bases, making it possible to answer queries based on knowledge collected from multiple sources without a common ontology. New assertions are found by computing graph similarity with principle component analysis to draw analogies across multiple knowledge bases. Experiments are designed to find new assertions for a Chinese commonsense knowledge base using the OMCS ConceptNet and similarly for WordNet. The assertions are voted by online users to verify that 75.77% / 77.59% for Chinese ConceptNet / WordNet respectively are good, despite the low overlap in coverage among the knowledge bases.

Comirit is a framework for commonsense reasoning that combines simulation, logical deduction and passive machine learning. While a passive, observation-driven approach to learning is safe and highly conservative, it is limited to inte-raction only with those objects that it has previously ob-served. In this paper we describe a preliminary exploration of methods for extending Comirit to allow safe action selection in uncertain situations, and to allow reward-maximizing selection of behaviors.

Our goal is for an autonomous learning agent to acquire the knowledge that serves as the foundations of common sense from its own experience without outside guidance. This requires the agent to (1) learn the structure of its own sensors and effectors; (2) learn a model of space around itself; (3) learn to move effectively in that space; (4) identify and describe objects, as distinct from the static environment; (5) learn and represent actions for affecting those objects, including preconditions and postconditions, and so on. We will provide examples of progress we have made, and the roadmap we envision for future research.