This paper describes how the SP theory of intelligence, outlined in an Appendix, may throw light on aspects of commonsense reasoning (CSR) and commonsense knowledge (CSK) (together shortened to CSRK), as discussed in another paper by Ernest Davis and Gary Marcus (DM). The SP system has the generality needed for CSRK: Turing equivalence; the generality of information compression as the foundatio...

Story understanding systems need to be able to perform commonsense reasoning, specifically regarding characters’ goals and their associated actions. Some efforts have been made to form large-scale commonsense knowledge bases, but integrating that knowledge into story understanding systems remains a challenge. We have implemented the Aspire system, an application of large-scale commonsense knowl...

This paper describes an information broker capable of retrieving texts from the WWWeb by using con-textual pointers. The broker is a client for TextNet, a text-based knowledge base using WordNet as a lexical backbone and a contextual inference scheme motivated by abductive semantic connectivity. The ability to obtain relevant information from the web is determined by a combination of (1) the te...

The work reported here arises from an attempt to provide a body of simple information about diet and its effect on various common medical conditions. Expressing this knowledge in natural language has a number of advantages. It also raises a number of difficult issues. We will consider solutions, and partial solutions, to these issues below. 1 Commonse knowledge Suppose you wanted to have a syst...

Computers are increasingly expected to make smart decisions based on what humans consider commonsense. This would require computers to understand their environment, including properties of objects in the environment (e.g., a wheel is round), relations between objects (e.g., two wheels are part of a bike, or a bike is slower than a car) and interactions of objects (e.g., a driver drives a car on...

representation research is to develop content theories that achieve a high degree of both competency and coverage. We describe a new methodology for constructing formal theories in commonsense knowledge domains that complements traditional knowledge representation approaches by first addressing issues of coverage. We show how a close examination of a very general task (strategic planning) leads...

To enable human-level artificial intelligence,machinesmust have access to the same kind of commonsense knowledge about the world that people have. e best source of such knowledge is text – learning by reading. Implicit in linguistic discourse is information about what people assume to be possible or expect to happen. From these references, I obtain an extensive collection of semantically under...