Learner: a system for acquiring commonsense knowledge by analogy

One of the long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence is construction of a machine that is capable of reasoning about the everyday world the way humans are. In this paper, I first argue that construction of a large collection of statements about everyday world (a repository of commonsense knowledge) is a valuable step towards this long-term goal. Then, I point out that volunteer contributors over the Internet — a frequently overlooked source of knowledge — can be tapped to construct such a knowledge repository. To operationalize construction of a large commonsense knowledge repository by volunteer contributors, I then introduce cumulative analogy, a class of analogy-based reasoning algorithms that leverage existing knowledge to pose knowledge acquisition questions to the volunteer contributors. The algorithms have been implemented and deployed as the Learner system. To date, about 3,400 volunteer contributors have interacted with the system over the course of 11 months, increasi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: KCAP
• Authors: Timothy Chklovski
• Keywords: Commonsense Knowledge, KCAP 2003, Knowledge Repository, Volunteer Contributors