Common sense knowledge and language
Examples:
- The police arrested the demonstrators because they feared violence.
- The police arrested the demonstrators because they advocated violence.
- They drank two cups of tea because they were warm.
- They drank two cups of tea because they were cold.
- The box is in the pen.
- The pen is in the box.
- Time flies like an arrow.
- Fruit flies like an apple.
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
- She saw the man in the park with a dog.
- She saw the man in the park with a statue.
- She saw the man in the park with a telescope.
Language highlights and connects
concepts and relationships that people know from their experiences.
- He opened the ... with the ... and walked inside.
- He ... the door with the key and ... inside.
- ... opened the door ... the key and walked ...
These examples show that individual words are not so important for
understanding. A sentence evokes a mental image because people have
knowledge about the world. Language provides hints for constructing
mental images but does not provide a complete description of
reality.
Therefore natural language understanding and processing requires
common sense knowledge and context.
What is "context"?
Can common sense knowledge and context be stored in a (formal) language?
If "yes", it can be stored in ontologies such as CYC.
CYC
- concepts and assertions
- context and micro-theories (eg. theories of space, temporal reasoning)
- CYC-L (logical inferences)
CYC's applications (as reported in 1995)
- information retrieval (eg. detailed user model)
- (semi-automatically) linking heterogeneous information sources
(eg. interface between two different databases)
- processing structured data (eg identify inconsistencies in databases)
- assist in word processing (spell checking, grammar, vocabulary,
word and sentence completion)
- assist in speech recognition
- simulations (eg. in adventure games)
- image retrieval using image captions
- machine translation