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the record · 2002 · common sense reasoning

Goose: a goal-oriented search engine with commonsense

Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman & Ted Selker (2002). Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (Eds. De Bra, Brusilovsky, Conejo), LNCS 2347, 253–263, Springer.

116 citationsBest AI Paper Award · Asociación Española para la Inteligencia Artificial
PDFDOI

GOOSE starts from the mismatch between how a novice states a goal and how a search engine expects a query. It parses a natural-language request into a semantic frame, classifies the goal, combines everyday knowledge with search expertise, and emits a reformulated query; raw keywords remain the fallback. Four novice users tried constrained tasks. The system inferred seven of eight household-problem queries, where average relevance rose from Google's 3.5 to 6.1, but only one of eight product-research queries, where it did slightly worse. Those results reveal the system honestly: useful inside familiar domains, brittle outside them. The sample was tiny, categories were chosen manually, trademarked products were largely missing, and the paper explicitly says the prototype was not yet generally robust.

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