Speer, Robert
Automated Color Selection Using Semantic Knowledge
Havasi, Catherine (MIT Media Lab) | Speer, Robert (MIT Media Lab) | Holmgren, Justin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Colorizer is a program that hypothesizes color values that represent a given word or sentence, taking into account both physical descriptions of objects and their emotional connotations. This new application of common sense reasoning uses background knowledge about the world to build a model of the connections between everyday things, and uses this model to guess an appropriate color for a word. Colorizer can run over either static text or real time input, such as a speech recognition stream. It has applications in games, the arts, and webpage design.
Coarse Word-Sense Disambiguation Using Common Sense
Havasi, Catherine (MIT Media Lab) | Speer, Robert (MIT Media Lab) | Pustejovsky, James (Brandeis University)
Coarse word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an NLP task that is both important and practical: it aims to distinguish senses of a word that have very different meanings, while avoiding the complexity that comes from trying to finely distinguish every possible word sense. Reasoning techniques that make use of common sense information can help to solve the WSD problem by taking word meaning and context into account. We have created a system for coarse word sense disambiguation using blending, a common sense reasoning technique, to combine information from SemCor, WordNet, ConceptNet and Extended WordNet. Within that space, a correct sense is suggested based on the similarity of the ambiguous word to each of its possible word senses. The general blending-based system performed well at the task, achieving an f-score of 80.8\% on the 2007 SemEval Coarse Word Sense Disambiguation task.
Open Mind Common Sense: Crowd-sourcing for Common Sense
Havasi, Catherine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Speer, Robert (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Arnold, Kenneth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Lieberman, Henry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Alonso, Jason (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Moeller, Jesse (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is a freely available crowd-sourced knowledge base of natural language statements about the world. The goal of Open Mind Common Sense is to provide intuition to AI systems and applications by giving them access to a broad collection of basic information and the computational tools to work with this data. For our system demo, we will be presenting three aspects of the OMCS project: the OMCS knowledge base, the Concept-Net semantic network (Liu and Singh 2004) (Havasi, Speer, and Alonso 2007), and the AnalogySpace algorithm (Speer, Havasi, and Lieberman 2008) which deals well with noisy, user-contributed data. Figure 1: AnalogySpace discovers patterns in common sense Open Mind Common Sense takes a distributed approach knowledge and uses them for inference. The project allows the general public to enter commonsense score to indicate its reliability, which increases either when knowledge into it, without requiring any knowledge a contributor votes for a statement through our Web site of linguistics, artificial intelligence, or computer science.The or when multiple contributors submit equivalent statements OMCS has been collecting commonsense statements from independently.
Reducing the Dimensionality of Data Streams using Common Sense
Havasi, Catherine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Alonso, Jason (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Speer, Robert (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Increasingly, we need to computationally understand real-time streams of information in places such as news feeds, speech streams, and social networks. We present Streaming AnalogySpace, an efficient technique that discovers correlations in and makes predictions about sparse natural-language data that arrives in a real-time stream. AnalogySpace is a noise-resistant PCA-based inference technique designed for use with collaboratively collected common sense knowledge and semantic networks. Streaming AnalogySpace advances this work by computing it incrementally using CCIPCA, and keeping a dense cache of recently-used features to efficiently represent a sparse and open domain. We show that Streaming AnalogySpace converges to the results of standard AnalogySpace, and verify this by evaluating its accuracy empirically on common-sense predictions against standard AnalogySpace.