Microsoft strives to give computers common sense with Concept Graph

Today, Microsoft Research is publicly releasing its effort to tackle just one of the problems plaguing natural language understanding -- knowledge. The company believes that background knowledge is one of the key separators between the way humans and machines understand language. Probase, a knowledge database Microsoft has been working on for quite some time, is serving as the base for a new public tool called Microsoft Concept Graph. Probase brings 5.4 million concepts to the table, beating other knowledge databases like Cyc, which offers 120,000 concepts. The goal of all the connected information is to support text analysis by mixing interpretations with probabilities -- this is very similar to the way humans use rapid process of elimination to accomplish the same task.