Learning Sociocultural Knowledge via Crowdsourced Examples

Computational systems can use sociocultural knowledge to understand human behavior and interact with humans in more natural ways. However, such systems are limited by their reliance on hand-authored sociocultural knowledge and models. We introduce an approach to automatically learn robust, script-like sociocultural knowledge from crowdsourced narratives. Crowdsourcing, the use of anonymous human workers, provides an opportunity for rapidly acquir­ing a corpus of examples of situations that are highly specialized for our purpose yet sufficiently varied, from which we can learn a versatile script. We describe a semi-automated process by which we query human workers to write natural language narrative examples of a given situation and learn the set of events that can occur and the typical even ordering.