Searching for Common Sense: Populating Cyc™ from the Web

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 20

Semantic Web, Information Retrieval, and Extraction

The Cyc project is predicated on the idea that effective machine learning depends on having a core of knowledge that provides a context for novel learned information - what is known informally as "common sense." Over the last twenty years, a sufficient core of common sense knowledge has been entered into Cyc to allow it to begin effectively and flexibly supporting its most important task: increasing its own store of world knowledge. In this paper, we present initial work on a method of using a combination of Cyc and the World Wide Web, accessed via Google, to assist in entering knowledge into Cyc. The long-term goal is automating the process of building a consistent, formalized representation of the world in the Cyc knowledge base via machine learning. We present initial results of this work and describe how we expect the knowledge acquisition process to become more accurate, faster, and more automated in the future.