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the record · 2004 · common sense reasoning

Commonsense reasoning in and over natural language

Hugo Liu & Push Singh (2004). Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (Eds. Negoita, Howlett, Jain), LNCS 3215, 293–306, Springer.

217 citations
PDFDOI

Formal logic offers precision, but everyday knowledge arrives in elastic phrases. This paper keeps ConceptNet's common sense close to natural language, then supplies the “glue” needed to reason across different wordings. Concepts are decomposed and located in WordNet, dictionaries, verb classes, and FrameNet; heuristic semantic distance then allows spreading activation, fuzzy inference, and analogy to bridge phrases such as “buy food” and “purchase groceries.” The source corpus held nearly 700,000 Open Mind statements, yielding more than 250,000 knowledge elements across nineteen relation types. The reported similarity percentages are worked examples rather than scores against a gold standard. Ambiguity, duplication, surface parsing, and task-dependent weights remain explicit costs of choosing linguistic flexibility over a complete formal semantics.

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