After explicating the need for a large commonsense knowledge base spanning human consensus knowledge, we report on many of the lessons learned over the first five years of attempting its construction. We have come a long way in terms of methodology, representation language, techniques for efficient inferencing, the ontology of the knowledge base, and the environment and infrastructure in which the knowledge base is being built. We describe the evolution of Cyc and its current state and close with a look at our plans and expectations for the coming five years, including an argument for how and why the project might conclude at the end of this time.

In the emerge from a massive knowledge this subject.

After explicating the need for a large commonsense knowledge base spanning human consensus knowledge, we report on many of the lessons learned over the first five years of attempting its construction. We have come a long way in terms of methodology, representation language, techniques for efficient inferencing, the ontology of the knowledge base, and the environment and infrastructure in which the knowledge base is being built. We describe the evolution of Cyc and its current state and close with a look at our plans and expectations for the coming five years, including an argument for how and why the project might conclude at the end of this time.

The book under review here, Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project, describes progress so far in an attempt to build a system that is intended to exhibit general common-sense reasoning ability. This review first discusses aspects of the Cyc system, with a focus on important decisions made in designing its knowledge representation language, and on how claims about the performance of the system might be validated.‡ The review then turns to the book itself, discussing both its merits and its faults.

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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.Morgan Kaufmann

AI Magazine Volume 10 Number 4 (1989) ( AAAI) generated some controversy. Relative to the discussion of the role of strong syllables in lexical segmentation, Gerry Altmann of CSTR reviewed some of the evidence based on computational studies of large The 1988 Workshop on Cognitive bone. Evidence from human studies computerized lexicons (20,000 Models of Speech Processing was suggested that the spurious word is words). This evidence suggested that held at Park Hotel Fiorelle, Sperlonga, activated, even though in principle it a stressed syllable conveys more Italy, on 16-20 May 1988. Twentyfive would be possible to prevent this activation information about the identity of the participants gathered in this by only accessing the lexicon at word in which it occurs than an small coastal village, where the the offset of some previously found unstressed syllable.

The AI lab at the Courant Institute at New York University (NYU) is pursuing many different areas of artificial intelligence (AI), including natural language processing, vision, common sense reasoning, information structuring, learning, and expert systems. Other groups in the Computer Science Department are studying such AI-related areas as text analysis, parallel Lisp and Prolog, robotics, low-level vision, and evidence theory.

To support our reasoning abilities perception must recover environmental regularities—e.g., rigidity, “objectness,” axes of symmetry—for later use by cognition. To create a theory of how our perceptual apparatus can produce meaningful cognitive primitives from an array of image intensities we require a representation whose elements may be lawfully related to important physical regularities, and that correctly describes the perceptual organization people impose on the stimulus. Unfortunately, the representations that are currently available were originally developed for other purposes (e.g., physics, engineering) and have so far proven unsuitable for the problems of perception or common-sense reasoning. In answer to this problem we present a representation that has proven competent to accurately describe an extensive variety of natural forms (e.g., people, mountains, clouds, trees), as well as man-made forms, in a succinct and natural manner. The approach taken in this representational system is to describe scene structure at a scale that is similar to our naive perceptual notion of “a part,” by use of descriptions that reflect a possible formative history of the object, e.g., how the object might have been constructed from lumps of clay.

The major limitations in building large software have always been (a) its brittleness when confronted by problems that were not foreseen by its builders, and (by the amount of manpower required. The recent history of expert systems, for example highlights how constricting the brittleness and knowledge acquisition bottlenecks are. Moreover, standard software methodology (e.g., working from a detailed "spec") has proven of little use in AI, a field which by definition tackles ill- structured problems. How can these bottlenecks be widened? Attractive, elegant answers have included machine learning, automatic programming, and natural language understanding. But decades of work on such systems have convinced us that each of these approaches has difficulty "scaling up" for want a substantial base of real world knowledge.