When we are confronted with unexpected situations, we deal of background knowledge and special-purpose reasoners to with them by falling back on our general knowledge or making support general inference. Recent advances in text mining, analogies to other things we know. When software applications crowdsourcing, and professional knowledge engineering efforts fail, on the other hand, they often do so in brittle have finally led to commonsense knowledge bases of and unfriendly ways. At the same time, new application colleagues grappling with representation and reasoning, to domains are giving fresh insights into desiderata for common Doug Lenat, Push Singh, and Lenhart Schubert conducting sense reasoners and guidance for knowledge collection large scale engineering projects to construct collections efforts.

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.

Learning to plausibly reason with minimal user intervention could significantly improve knowledge acquisition. We describe how to integrate graph-based heuristic generalization, higher-order knowledge, and reinforcement learning to learn to produce plausible inferences with only small amounts of user training. Experiments on ResearchCyc KB contents show significant improvement in Q/A performance with high accuracy.

When general purpose software agents fail, it's often because they're brittle and need more background commonsense knowledge. In this paper we present relation properties as a valuable type of commonsense knowledge that can be automatically inferred at scale by reading the Web. People base many commonsense inferences on their knowledge of relation properties such as functionality, transitivity, and others. For example, all people know that bornIn(Year) satisfies the functionality property, meaning that each person can be born in exactly one year. Thus inferences like "Obama was born in 1961, so he was not born in 2008", which computers do not know, are obvious even to children. We demonstrate scalable heuristics for learning relation functionality from noisy Web text that outperform existing approaches to detecting functionality. The heuristics we use address Web NLP challenges that are also common to learning other relation properties, and can be easily transferred. Each relation property we learn for a Web-scale set of relations will enable computers to solve real tasks, and the data from learning many such properties will be a useful addition to general commonsense knowledge bases.

Computational Narrative has provided several examples of how to process narrations using semantical approaches. While many useful concepts for computational management of stories have been unveiled, a common barrier has hindered their development: semantic knowledge is still too complex to handle. In this paper, a focus shift based on narrative structure is proposed. Instead of digging deeper into the possibilities of semantic processing, analysing structural properties of stories and keeping the semantic load to a minimum can allow for a more efficient use of available narrative corpora, even without mimicking human behaviour.

In recent years, ConceptNet has gained notoriety in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a textual commonsense knowledge base (CSKB) for its utilization of k-lines (Liu and Sing, 2004a) which make it suitable for making practical inferences on corpora (Liu and Sing, 2004b). However, until now, ConceptNet has lacked support for many non-English languages. To alleviate this problem, we have implemented a software toolset for the Japanese Language that allows Japanese to be used with ConceptNet's concept inference system. This paper discusses the implementation of this toolset and a possible path for the development of toolsets in other languages with similar features.

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.

This paper presents our work in developing a commonsense knowledge source based on semantic concepts about objects, activities and their relationships in a child’s daily life. This commonsense ontology is then used by our automatic story generator to output children's stories of the fable form from a given input picture. The generated story is a narration of the events of a basic plot that flows from negative to positive (rule violation to value acquisition), using themes that are familiar to children. The paper ends with descriptions of further investigations that are underway to extend the system, including using a formal upper ontology to represent storytelling knowledge, and the generation of stories from a given set of sequential scenes.

We present CrossBridge, a practical algorithm for retrieving analogies in large, sparse semantic networks. Other algorithms adopt a generate-and-test approach, retrieving candidate analogies by superficial similarity of concepts, then testing them for the particular relations involved in the analogy. CrossBridge adopts a global approach. It organizes the entire knowledge space at once, as a matrix of small concept-and-relation subgraph patterns versus actual occurrences of subgraphs from the knowledge base. It uses the familiar mathematics of dimensionality reduction to reorganize this space along dimensions representing approximate semantic similarity of these subgraphs. Analogies can then be retrieved by simple nearest-neighbor comparison. CrossBridge also takes into account not only knowledge directly related to the source and target domains, but also a large background Commonsense knowledge base. Commonsense influences the mapping between domains, preserving important relations while ignoring others. This property allows CrossBridge to find more intuitive and extensible analogies. We compare our approach with an implementation of structure mapping and show that our algorithm consistently finds analogies in cases where structure mapping fails. We also present some discovered analogies.

How do reasoning systems that learn evolve over time? Characterizing the evolution of these systems is important for understanding their limitations and gaining insights into the interplay between learning and reasoning. We describe an inverse ablation model for studying how learning and reasoning interact: Create a small knowledge base by ablation, and incrementally re-add facts, collecting snapshots of reasoning performance of the system to measure properties of interest. Experiments with this model suggest that different concepts show different rates of growth, and that the density of facts is an important parameter for modulating the rate of learning.