Formalizations of Commonsense Psychology

The central challenge in commonsense knowledge representation research is to develop content theories that achieve a high degree of both competency and coverage. We describe a new methodology for constructing formal theories in commonsense knowledge domains that complements traditional knowledge representation approaches by first addressing issues of coverage. We show how a close examination of a very general task (strategic planning) leads to a catalog of the concepts and facts that must be encoded for general commonsense reasoning. These concepts are sorted into a manageable number of coherent domains, one of which is the representational area of commonsense human memory. We then elaborate on these concepts using textual corpus-analysis techniques, where the conceptual distinctions made in natural language are used to improve the definitions of the concepts that should be expressible in our formal theories.