--- Gabriel R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Also, if you can think of any way to turn the knowledge-entry process into a > fun game or competition, go for it. I've been told by a few people working > on similar projects that making the knowledge-providing process engaging and > fun for visitors ended up being a lot more important (and difficult) than > they'd expected.
Cyc has a game like this called FACTory at http://www.cyc.com/ It's purpose is to help refine its knowledge base. It presents statements and asks you to rate them as true, false, don't know or doesn't make sense. For example. - Most shirts are heavier than most appendixes. - Pages are typically located in HVAC Chem Bio facilities. - Terminals are typically located in studies. - People perform or are involved in paying a mortgage more frequenty than they perform or are involved in overbearing. - Most BTU dozer blades are wider than most T-64 medium tanks. The game exposes Cyc's shortcomings pretty quickly. Cyc seems to lack a world model and a language model. Sentences seem to be constructed by relating common properties of unrelated objects. The set of common properties is fairly small: size, weight, cost, frequency (for events), containment, etc. There does not seem to be any sense that Cyc understands the purpose or function of objects. The result is that context is no help in disambiguating terms that have more than one meaning, such as "appendix", "page", or "terminal". A language model would allow a more natural grammar, such as "People pay mortgages more often than they are overbearing". This example also exposes the fallacy of logical inference. Inference allows you to draw conclusions such as this, but why would you? Inference is not a good model of human thought. A good model would compare related objects. It might ask instead whether people make mortgage payments more frequently than they receive paychecks. The game gives no hint that Cyc understands such relations. Cyc has millions of hand coded assertions. It has taken over 20 years to get this far, and it seems we are not even close. This seems to be a problem with every knowledge representation based on labeled graphs (frame-slot, first order logic, connectionist, expert system, etc). Using English words to label the elements of your data structure does not substitute for a language model. Also, this labeling tempts you to examine and update the knowledge manually. We should know by now that there is just too much data to do this. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
