This paper presents a novel way for assessing the affective qualities of natural language and a scenario for its use. Previous approaches to textual affect sensing have employed keyword spotting, lexical affinity, statistical methods, and hand-crafted models. This paper demonstrates a new approach, using large-scale real-world knowledge about the inherent affective nature of everyday situations (such as "getting into a car accident") to classify sentences into "basic" emotion categories. This commonsense approach has new robustness implications.

Abstract. Open Mind Common Sense is a knowledge acquisition system designed to acquire commonsense knowledge from the general public over the web. We describe and evaluate our first fielded system, which enabled the construction of a 450,000 assertion commonsense knowledge base. We then discuss how our second-generation system addresses weaknesses discovered in the first. The new system acquires facts, descriptions, and stories by allowing participants to construct and fill in natural language templates. It employs word-sense disambiguation and methods of clarifying entered knowledge, analogical inference to provide feedback, and allows participants to validate knowledge and in turn each other. 1

A novice search engine user may find searching the web for information difficult and frustrating because she may naturally express search goals rather than the topic keywords search engines need. In this paper, we present GOOSE (goal-oriented search engine), an adaptive search engine interface that uses natural language processing to parse a user's search goal, and uses "common sense" reasoning to translate this goal into an effective query. For a source of common sense knowledge, we use Open Mind, a knowledge base of approximately 400,000 simple facts such as "If a pet is sick, take it to the veterinarian " garnered from a Web-wide network of contributors. While we cannot be assured of the robustness of the common sense inference, in a substantial number of cases, GOOSE is more likely to satisfy the user's original search goals than simple keywords or conventional query expansion.

p0220 p0225 p0230 Many users are familiar with the interesting but limited functionality of data detector interfaces like Microsoft’s Smart Tags and Google’s AutoLink. In this chapter we significantly expand the breadth and functionality of this type of user interface through the use of large-scale knowledge bases of semantic information. The result is a Web browser that is able to generate personalized semantic hypertext, providing a goal-oriented browsing experience. We present (1) Creo, a programming-by-example system for the Web that allows users to create a general purpose procedure with a single example; and (2) Miro, a data detector that matches the content of a page to high-level user goals. An evaluation with 34 subjects found that they were more efficient using our system, and that the subjects would use features like these if they were integrated into their Web browser. s0010 p0235 p0240

In a hypermedia authoring task, an author often wants to set up meaningful connections between different media, such as text and photographs. To facilitate this task, it is helpful to have a software agent dynamically adapt the presentation of a media database to the user's authoring activities, and look for opportunities for annotation and retrieval. However, potential connections are often missed because of differences in vocabulary or semantic connections that are "obvious" to people but that might not be explicit. In a hypermedia authoring task, an author often wants to set up meaningful connections between different media, such as text and photographs. To facilitate this task, it is helpful to have a software agent dynamically adapt the presentation of a media database to the user's authoring activities, and look for opportunities for annotation and retrieval. However, potential connections are often missed because of differences in vocabulary or semantic connections that are "obvious" to people but that might not be explicit. ARIA (Annotation and Retrieval Integration Agent) is a software agent that acts an assistant to a user writing e-mail or Web pages. As the user types a story, it does continuous retrieval and ranking on a photo database. It can use descriptions in the story to semi-automatically annotate pictures. To improve the associations beyond simple keyword matching, we use natural language parsing techniques to extract important roles played by text, such as "who, what, where, when". Since many of the photos depict common everyday situations such as weddings or recitals, we use a common sense knowledge base, Open Mind, to fill in semantic gaps that might otherwise prevent successful associations.

■ A long-standing dream of artificial intelligence has been to put commonsense knowledge into computers—enabling machines to reason about everyday life. Some projects, such as Cyc, have begun to amass large collections of such knowledge. However, it is widely assumed that the use of common sense in interactive applications will remain impractical for years, until these collections can be considered sufficiently complete and commonsense reasoning sufficiently robust. Recently, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory, we have had some success in applying commonsense knowledge in a number of intelligent interface agents, despite the admittedly spotty coverage and unreliable inference of today’s

Acquiring knowledge has long been the major bottleneck preventing the rapid spread of AI systems. Manual approaches are slow and costly. Machine-learning approaches have limitations in the depth and breadth of knowledge they can acquire. The spread of the Internet has made possible a third solution: building knowledge bases by mass collaboration, with thousands of volunteers contributing simultaneously. While this approach promises large improvements in the speed and cost of knowledge base development, it can only succeed if the problem of ensuring the quality, relevance and consistency of the knowledge is addressed, if contributors are properly motivated, and if the underlying algorithms scale. In this paper we propose an architecture that meets all these desiderata. It uses first-order probabilistic reasoning techniques to combine potentially inconsistent knowledge sources of varying quality, and it uses machine-learning techniques to estimate the quality of knowledge. We evaluate the approach using a series of synthetic knowledge bases and a pilot study in the domain of printer troubleshooting.

People cannot type as fast as they think, especially when faced with the constraints of mobile devices. There have been numerous approaches to solving this problem, including research in augmented input devices and predictive typing aids. We propose an alternative approach to predictive text entry based on commonsense reasoning. Using OMCSNet, a large-scale semantic network that aggregates and normalizes the contributions made to Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS), our system is able to show significant success in predicting words based on their first few letters. We evaluate this commonsense approach against traditional statistical methods, demonstrating comparable performance, and suggest that combining commonsense and statistical approaches could achieve superior performance. Mobile device implementations of the commonsense predictive typing aid demonstrate that such a system could be applied to just about any computing environment.

This thesis describes EM-ONE, an architecture for commonsense thinking capable of reflective reasoning about situations involving physical, social, and mental dimensions. EM-ONE uses as its knowledge base a library of commonsense narratives, each describing the physical, social, and mental activity that occurs during an interaction between several actors. EM-ONE reasons with these narratives by applying "mental critics, " procedures that debug problems that exist in the outside world or within EM-ONE itself. Mental critics draw upon commonsense narratives to suggest courses of action, methods for deliberating about the circumstances and consequences of those actions, and—when things go wrong—ways to reflect upon and debug the activity of previously invoked mental critics. Mental critics are arranged into six layers, the reactive, deliberative, reflective, self-reflective, self-conscious, and self-ideals layers. The selection of mental critics within these six layers is itself guided by a separate collection

One of the long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence is construction of a machine that is capable of reasoning about the everyday world the way humans are. In this paper, I first argue that construction of a large collection of statements about everyday world (a repository of commonsense knowledge) is a valuable step towards this long-term goal. Then, I point out that volunteer contributors over the Internet — a frequently overlooked source of knowledge — can be tapped to construct such a knowledge repository. To operationalize construction of a large commonsense knowledge repository by volunteer contributors, I then introduce cumulative analogy, a class of analogy-based reasoning algorithms that leverage existing knowledge to pose knowledge acquisition questions to the volunteer contributors. The algorithms have been implemented and deployed as the Learner system. To date, about 3,400 volunteer contributors have interacted with the system over the course of 11 months, increasing a starting collection of 47,147 statements by 362 % to a total of 217,971. The deployed system and the growing collection of knowledge it acquired are publicly available from