A first experimental demonstration of massive knowledge infusion
Loizos Michael, Leslie Gabriel Valiant · 2008
A central goal of Artificial Intelligence is to create sys-tems that embody commonsense knowledge in a reli-able enough form that it can be used for reasoning in novel situations. Knowledge Infusion is an approach to this problem in which the commonsense knowledge is acquired by learning. In this paper we report on exper-iments on a corpus of a half million sentences of natu-ral language text that test whether commonsense knowl-edge can be usefully acquired through this approach. We examine the task of predicting a deleted word from the remainder of a sentence for some 268 target words. As baseline we consider how well this task can be per-formed using learned rules based on the words within a fixed distance of the target word and their parts of speech. This captures an approach that has been previ-ously demonstrated to be highly successful for a variety of natural language tasks. We then go on to learn from the corpus rules that embody commonsense knowledge, additional to the knowledge used in the baseline case. We show that chaining learned commonsense rules to-gether leads to measurable improvements in prediction performance on our task as compared with the baseline. This is apparently the first experimental demonstration that commonsense knowledge can be learned from natu-ral inputs on a massive scale reliably enough that chain-ing the learned rules is efficacious for reasoning.