Encoding Knowledge of Commonsense Psychology

In previous papers (Gordon and Hobbs, 2003, 2004) we have described a methodology for determining what knowledge should be included in the knowledge base for an intelligent agent, capable of constructing and executing plans to achieve its goals. An intelligent agent is at least a planning mechanism, so Gordon (2004) asked what concepts are necessary for the common strategies that people use in achieving their goals. He investigated ten different domains, including politics, personal relationships, artistic performance, and warfare, and collected 372 strategies. He authored representations of these strategies in order to identify a controlled vocabulary involving of concepts. These concepts were categorized into 48 different representational areas, such as sets, space, and time. Thirty of the representational areas, involving 635 concepts, were concerned with commonsense psychology; among these are memory, knowledge management, planning, and so on. This result by itself demonstrates the very great importance of commonsense psychology in the construction of intelligent agents. Gordon et al. (2003) then, to define further each of the representational areas, augmented the list of concepts by investigating the English language expressions for concepts in each area. The result was a list of 528 concepts, a set that identifies the target coverage of a formal theory of commonsense psychology. The authors began the development of formal theories that would encompass this list of concepts. In our earlier work (Gordon and Hobbs, 2003), we described the first theory we constructed, memory, as an illustration of the method. We have now completed 14 of the 30 theories, and this paper provides an overview of this work as we close in on the halfway mark.