BUILDING COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE BASES - 3 WAYS.

 BUILDING COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE BASES - 3 WAYS.

Here are few examples of commonsense knowledge –

Soaps are materials used to clean things.

When children are given new things, they become happy.

Cars are large, external things used for transportation.

Cars contain people.


There are 2 kinds of items in the world - General and Specific. For example, ‘House’ (general) and ‘Pat Hayes’ (specific). Commonsense Knowledge is typically a relationship amongst general items (general concepts).

The above examples of commonsense knowledge contain general items (concepts) like - Material, cleaning, thing, external, transportation, containment, people, houses

Generate triplets, or quartets, or pentets, or.....(the more the better) of concepts purely randomly. For example, from the above set of concepts, we have one triplet as –

House, new, cleaning

OR, a quartet – house, transportation, containment, people

Now, form a sentence with these general items / concepts.

3 ways, (in increasing order of obviousness of the ways)-

1) Google search – search strictly for complete English sentences containing ALL those words.

Now, the web is written for people with commonsense. So a lot of general, basic knowledge won’t be in such worded, expressed form on the web. But still, quite a lot will be.

2) Ask the general public to form sentences from the word-sets presented to them on the web. This is a lot easier and more useful and feasible than asking the general public to feed in commonsense knowledge like the Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) project of MIT Media Lab did.

3) First enlist ALL possible kinds of sentences in English language on the basis of the permutations of N, V, Adj, Adv,.....Now, given a random, say, quartet of words, form valid grammatical sentences from them FALLING INTO the possible types of valid Part-Of-Speech-permutations enlisted before. Put up the list on the web. Now children/people just have to tick or cross on each if it MEANS something sensible or not. For example, one combination of the quartet example taken above, which falls into a valid grammatical format is – People contain transportation houses. This will get a cross.