Against Common Sense

Mental Attitudes and Common Sense Psychology: the Case against Elimination

Common Sense

I like your columns, but they’re really all just common sense,” a client told me. He didn’t have a software background, and my columns were his first introduction to systematic ways of understanding software projects. To my chagrin, the net effect of a well-written column appeared to be that he thought software engineering was trivial! The idea that good software engineering “is all just common...

Coarse Word-Sense Disambiguation Using Common Sense

Coarse word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an NLP task that is both important and practical: it aims to distinguish senses of a word that have very different meanings, while avoiding the complexity that comes from trying to finely distinguish every possible word sense. Reasoning techniques that make use of common sense information can help to solve theWSD problem by taking word meaning and conte...

Taming Sense Sparsity: a Common-Sense Approach

English. We present a novel algorithm and a linguistic resource named CLOSEST after ‘Common SEnse STrainer’. The resource contains a list of the main senses associated to a given term, and it was obtained by applying a simple set of pruning heuristics to the senses provided in the NASARI vectors for the set of 15K most frequent English terms. The preliminary experimentation provided encouraging...

280 Common Sense Reasoning

Even with powerful numerical computers, exploring complex dynamical systems requires significant human effort and judgment to prepare simulations and to interpret numerical results. This paper describes one-aspect of a computer program, KAM, that can autonomously prepare numerical simulations, and can automatically generate high-level, qualitative interpretations of the quantitative results. Gi...