Henry Lieberman, Hugo Liu, Push Singh & Barbara Barry (2004). Beating common sense into interactive applications. AI Magazine 25(4), 63–76, AAAI Press.
Lieberman, H., Liu, H., Singh, P., & Barry, B. (2004). Beating common sense into interactive applications. AI Magazine, 25(4), 63–76.
@article{lieberman2004beating,
author = {Henry Lieberman and Hugo Liu and Push Singh and Barbara Barry},
title = {Beating common sense into interactive applications},
journal = {AI Magazine},
volume = {25},
number = {4},
pages = {63--76},
publisher = {AAAI Press},
url = {https://starheartsong.com/papers/pdf/AIMag2004-BeatingCommonSense.pdf},
year = {2004}
}This article rejects the premise that a machine must possess complete, perfectly reliable common sense before applications can benefit from it. Its alternative is the fail-soft interface agent: inferred suggestions remain optional inside an interaction the user can complete conventionally. Bad suggestions can be ignored; missing knowledge merely makes the agent quiet. The paper surveys ARIA, affective text interfaces, documentary-video assistance, search reformulation, predictive text, and story systems, reporting small prototype studies where available. None was a large deployment, and teams sometimes added knowledge by hand. The contribution is therefore a product principle more than a claim of solved intelligence: design the interaction so partial understanding can help without gaining enough authority to break the task.