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the record · 2004 · common sense reasoning

Teaching machines about everyday life

Push Singh, Barbara Barry & Hugo Liu (2004). BT Technology Journal 22(4), 227–240, Kluwer Academic.

99 citations
PDFDOI

No single representation comfortably holds all of everyday life. This architectural paper compares three complementary systems: ConceptNet for broad semantic relations, LifeNet for probabilistic transitions between nearby moments, and StoryNet for actors, events, settings, goals, and themes across longer sequences. ConceptNet grew from nearly 700,000 public contributions; LifeNet contained about 80,000 propositions and 415,000 pairwise probability tables. StoryNet, and a browser joining the three, remained under development. The paper's value lies in the division of labor it makes visible: broad graphs are associative but local, probabilistic models tolerate uncertainty but lose expressiveness, and scripts preserve narrative structure but are harder to acquire. It proposes an integration rather than presenting a controlled comparison.

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