Open Mind Common Sense: Knowledge Acquisition from the General Public

Open Mind Common Sense is a knowledge acquisition system designed to acquire commonsense knowledge from the general public over the web. We describe and evaluate our first fielded system, which enabled the construction of a 400,000 assertion commonsense knowledge base. We then discuss how our second-generation system addresses weaknesses discovered in the first. The new system acquires facts, descriptions, and stories by allowing participants to construct and fill in natural language templates. It employs word-sense disambiguation and methods of clarifying entered knowledge, analogical inference to provide feedback, and allows participants to validate knowledge and in turn each other.