science

Open Mind Common Sense

Open Mind Common Sense is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Open Mind Common Sense rather than just read about it. In short: Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. It has been active from 1999 to 2016.

Key takeaways

Open Mind Common Sense belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Open Mind Common Sense to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Open Mind Common Sense from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. It has been active from 1999 to 2016. Since its founding, it has accumulated more than a million English facts from over 15,000 contributors in addition to knowledge bases in other languages. Much of OMCS's software is built on three interconnected representations: the natural language corpus that people interact with directly, a semantic network built from this corpus called ConceptNet, and a matrix-based representation of ConceptNet called AnalogySpace that can infer new knowledge using dimensionality reduction. The knowledge collected by Open Mind Common Sense has enabled research projects at MIT and elsewhere.

History The project was the brainchild of Marvin Minsky, Push Singh, Catherine Havasi, and others. Development work began in September 1999, and the project opened to the Internet a year later. Havasi described it in her dissertation as "an attempt to ... harness some of the distributed human computing power of the Internet, an idea which was then only in its early stages." The original OMCS was influenced by the website Everything2 and its predecessor, and presents a minimalist interface that is inspired by Google. Push Singh would have become a professor at the MIT Media Lab and lead the Common Sense Computing group in 2007, but committed suicide on February 28, 2006. The project is currently run by the Digital Intuition Group at the MIT Media Lab under Catherine Havasi.

Database and website There are many different types of knowledge in OMCS. Some statements convey relationships between objects or events, expressed as simple phrases of natural language: some examples include "A coat is used for keeping warm", "The sun is very hot", and "The last thing you do when you cook dinner is wash your dishes". The database also contains information on the emotional content of situations, in such statements as "Spending time with friends causes happiness" and "Getting into a car wreck makes one angry". OMCS contains information on people's desires and goals, both large and small, such as "People want to be respected" and "People want good coffee". Originally, these statements could be entered into the Web site as unconstrained sentences of text, which had to be parsed later. The current version of the Web site collects knowledge only using more structured fill-in-the-blank templates. OMCS also makes use of data collected by the Game With a Purpose "Verbosity". In its native form, the OMCS database is simply a collection of these short sentences that convey some common knowledge. In order to use this knowledge computationally, it has to be transformed into a more structured representation.

ConceptNet ConceptNet is a semantic network based on the information in the OMCS database. ConceptNet is expressed as a directed graph whose nodes are concepts, and whose edges are assertions of common sense about these concepts. Concepts represent sets of closely related natural language phrases, which could be noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, or clauses. ConceptNet is created from the natural-language assertions in OMCS by matching them against patterns using a shallow parser. Assertions are expressed as relations between two concepts, selected from a limited set of possible relations. The various relations represent common sentence patterns found in the OMCS corpus, and in particular, every "fill-in-the-blanks" template used on the knowledge-collection Web site is associated with a particular relation. The data structures that make up ConceptNet were significantly reorganized in 2007, and published as ConceptNet 3. The Software Agents group currently distributes a database and API for the new version 4.0. In 2010, OMCS co-founder and director Catherine Havasi, with Robyn Speer, Dennis Clark and Jason Alonso, created Luminoso, a text analytics software company that builds on ConceptNet. It uses ConceptNet as its primary lexical resource in order to help businesses make sense of and derive insight from vast amounts of qualitative data, including surveys, product reviews and social media.

Machine learning tools The information in ConceptNet can be used as a basis for machine learning algorithms. One representation, called AnalogySpace, uses singular value decomposition to generalize and represent patterns in the knowledge in ConceptNet, in a way that can be used in AI applications. Its creators distribute a Python machine learning toolkit called Divisi for performing machine learning based on text corpora, structured knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, and combinations of the two.

Comparison to other projects Other similar projects include Never-Ending Language Learning, Mindpixel (discontinued), Cyc, Learner, SenticNet, Freebase, YAGO, DBpedia, and Open Mind 1001 Questions, which have explored alternative approaches to collecting knowledge and providing incentive for participation. The Open Mind Common Sense project differs from Cyc because it has focused on representing the common sense knowledge it collected as English sentences, rather than using a formal logical structure. ConceptNet is described by one of its creators, Hugo Liu, as being structured more like WordNet than Cyc, due to its "emphasis on informal conceptual-connectedness over formal linguistic-rigor".

See also Attempto Controlled English (ACE), a controlled natural language Never-Ending Language Learning Mindpixel Semantic Web DBpedia Freebase (database) YAGO (database)

References

External links Open Mind Common Sense meta-repository Github ConceptNet AnalogySpace The Divisi inference toolkit Commonsense Computing Initiative's Webpage (Site doesn't exist) The Open Mind Initiative (Site doesn't exist) OMCSNetCPP - Open source C++ inference engine using the OMCSNet data Open Mind Common Sense in Brazil (Site broken) Open Heart Common Sense - Emotional common sense with art (Legacy page) Advanced Interaction Laboratory

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Open Mind Common Sense

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Open Mind Common Sense claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Open Mind Common Sense before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Open Mind Common Sense ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Open Mind Common Sense

In research: Open Mind Common Sense appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Open Mind Common Sense in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Open Mind Common Sense is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Creative Commons-licensed databases, Knowledge bases, Open-source artificial intelligence, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Open Mind Common Sense outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Open Mind Common Sense in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Open Mind Common Sense means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Open Mind Common Sense out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Open Mind Common Sense in simple terms?

Why does Open Mind Common Sense matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Open Mind Common Sense?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Open Mind Common Sense.