Check -> Introduction Our goal is to open the mental world of human beings to machines. To this end, we create a knowledgebase, called Probase. We hope that by injecting certain “general knowledge” into computing machines can gain a better understanding of human communication. An important question is, what does the word “understand” mean here? Con- sider the following example. For human beings, when we see “25 Oct 1881”, we recognize it as a date, although most of us do not know what it is about. However, if we are given a little more context, say the date is embedded in the following piece of short text “Pablo Picasso, 25 Oct 1881, Spain”, most of us would have guessed (correctly) that the date represents Pablo Picasso’s birthday. We are able to do this because we possess certain knowledge, and in this case, “one of the most important dates associated with a person is his birthday.” As another example, consider a problem in natural language processing. Hu- mans do not find sentences such as “animals other than dogs such as cats” am- biguous, but machine parsing can lead to two possible understandings: “cats are animals” or “cats are dogs.” Common sense tells us that cats cannot be dogs, which renders the second parsing improbable. It turns out what we need in order to act like a human in the above two exam- ples is nothing more than knowledge about concepts (e.g., persons and animals) and the ability to conceptualize (e.g., cats are animals). This is not a coincidence. Psychologist Gregory Murphy began his highly acclaimed book with the statement “Concepts are the glue that holds our mental world together” [8]. Nature magazine book review pointed out “Without concepts, there would be no mental world in the first place” [2]. Doubtless to say, having concepts and the ability to conceptualize is one of the defining characteristics of humanity. The question is then: How do we pass human concepts to machines, and how do we enable machines to conceptualize?
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 02:25:04 +0000
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