Lecture � MAS964 Common sense

Greg Detre

Thursday, November 14, 2002

 

Discussion about workshop yesterday

Bill Woods (Sun) � �What�s in a link?� (semantic networks)

IBM � new Common Sense effort in Watson (NY) � Doug, L Morgenstern, Erik Mueller, logician, statistician

Minsky � causal diversity matrix???

NSA � Danny Hillis� company (Applied Minds) involved

they�re also trying to use Cyc

ARDA

 

Admin

contribute to the bulletin board re cheap apartments etc.

papers for next week

Whirl (William Cohen) � interleaving search + inference

 

OMCS toolkit API available

query the OMCSNET for a word/concept

connect two concepts

spreading activation � find all somewhat related concepts (can you do intersections with that???)

 

Phil left a stack of Cyc memos with Push

Open Mind

trade-off between work you do on the front end to put the knowledge in, and work you do on the back end to get the knowledge out usefully

Phil Apley � user of Cyc

pga@ai.mit.edu

not affiliated with Cycorp

His bio

MIT AI Lab, Music cognition group, UI, Selfridge Pandemonium feature recogniser for fonts

DEC Cambridge research lab � intelligent calendaring + Personal information Management

evaluate/critic Cyc, started building his own Knowledge Editing Tools and Methodology

DEC withdrew $2.5m for Cyc

Cyc background

two representation languages

epistemological level language

predicate calculus with reification (2nd order)

elegant + uniform

but you can�t compute in it because of the computational complexity and undecidability

heuristic level language

variety of representations for efficiency of expression + inferencing

> 20 inferencing mechanisms with specialised representations

general truth maintenance system

default reasoning (requiring you to assert all the exceptions)

context mechanism later (early 90s)

supposed to be able to automatically translate between E- and H-level

context

supposed to be lightweight mechanisms

lifting rules???

e.g. what�s considered affordable in different countries

most concepts have different interpretations in different contexts

e.g. in an American context, the concept of a person an American

Henry: traditional logic doesn�t have any place to put �under these circumstances�� � how about quantifiers???

Lenat � dimensions of context space

Alan Kay � said of Lenat that he�s the master of taxonomising

taxonomies of context

problem solving context

event context

counterfactual context

hypothetical context

theory context

edit session context

3 flaws of Cyc

consensus reality + context

fallacy of consensus reality and the granularity of context � too little too late

afterthought

not at proper level of granularity

didn�t go back and re-implement assertions within contexts

did not include information in context pertaining to applicability: appropriate problem-solving contexts, completion state, teesting and validation, use history

did not focus on discourse contexts or other fine-grained contexts

management of the KR process

KE-Region

bases new concepts on templates

copy/paste/edit approach

allows incomplete/inconsistent/questionable assertions to be recorded the user is ready to install them

associates commentary with ssertions

groups related assertions

doesn�t scale

documentation doesn�t get updated

insufficient feedback

situated learning

does CS require a body?

ted: in our life, things get easier the more knowledge you have

do things get more complex when they get more complex?

this is the thing about human-built complex systems � they�re never robust

build agencies out of context later (Lenat idea)

 

KEView K-Browser

common lisp interface manager (CLIM) � now open source

visual future

object that refers to an incomplete computation state

continue your computation until you need that result

KETask/Extensions

self-reflective tools for managing the knowledge entry process

he thinks that if the regimented procedure he�s proposing had been used from the start, the Cyc database might be in a much better situation

Henry: if you make the knowledge entry task so difficult, then you just might not get enough knowledge

how would his little procedural tips help with the quality of the knowledge being entereed?

his claim is that there were just little errors and omissions being made all over the place, and not being picked up

it�s basically just a rigorous testing and bug-tracking/code-management system � just good software-engineering habits

DEC�s main interest in Cyc was probably the calendaring application

 

 

Talking to Ted

give him a demo

Adaptive interfaces

he�s really into adaptive UIs

the problem is if you adapt to the UI, and the UI is adapting to you

you can easily get out of phase

and if you make things transparent (i.e. signal the adaptations the system is making)

 

Ideas

how about doing the Open Mind semantic network based on time entered (so that stuff entered together is clustered together)???

Questions

reification vs 2nd order???

lazy evaluation???

what�s CycL???

regression test???