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 ...

An autonomous agent that explores and acts in a rich world needs knowledge to act effectively. This agent can use knowledge that is available in Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs), when the agent designer cannot encode all the information the agent might need. CSKBs include generalpurpose information about the everyday world in a formal language, but this information is not always correct, rel...

Commonsense knowledge is essential for fully understanding language in many situations. We acquire large-scale commonsense knowledge from humans using a game with a purpose (GWAP) developed on a smartphone spoken dialogue system. We transform the manual knowledge acquisition process into an enjoyable quiz game and have collected over 150,000 unique commonsense facts by gathering the data of mor...

In order to build software that can deeply understand people and our problems, we require computational tools that give machines the capacity to learn and reason about everyday life. We describe three commonsense knowledge bases that take unconventional approaches to representing, acquiring, and reasoning with large quantities of commonsense knowledge. Each adopts a different approach — Concept...

Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of semantic and world knowledge to influence children's and adults' moment-by-moment interpretation of a story. Seven-yearolds were less effective at bypassing stored semantic and world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Nevertheless, an effect of discours...

A variety of applications can benefit from broad and detailed repositories of linguistic and world knowledge. An emerging approach to acquiring such repositories is to collect them from volunteer contributors. To increase the volume of contributions, some deployed systems for collecting volunteer-contributed knowledge offer recognition or prizes to those who provide the highest volume of contri...