OMCSNet: A Commonsense Inference Toolkit

Imparting commonsense knowledge to computers enables a new class of intelligent applications better equipped to make sense of the everyday world and assist people with everyday tasks. While previous attempts have been made to acquire and structure commonsense knowledge, they have either been inadequate in capturing the breadth of knowledge needed for the enterprise, or their complicated representation schemes have made them difficult to incorporate into applications. In this paper we describe OMCSNet, a freely available commonsense knowledge base that at once possesses great breadth of knowledge and that can be easily incorporated into applications. Built from the Open Mind Common Sense corpus, which acquires commonsense knowledge from a web-based community of instructors, OMCSNet is a semantic network of 280,000 items of commonsense knowledge, and a set of tools for making inferences using this knowledge. We describe the structure and contents of OMCSNet and its associated inference toolkit, review applications that have incorporated it, and evaluate and analyze this resource.