What Needs to be Shared, to Enable the Semantic Web? © 2001 CYCORP Dr. Douglas B. Lenat President, C YCORP March 5, 2001

bits/bytes/streams/network… alphabet, special characters,… words, morphological variants,… syntactic meta-level markups (HTML) semantic meta-level markups (SGML, XML) content (logical representation of doc/page/...) context (common sense, recent utterances,…) What Needs to be Shared? What Needs to be Shared?

content (logical representation of doc/page/...) context (common sense, recent utterances,…)

Help find relevant information Combine info. from n sources Back & forth clarification dialogue content (logical representation of doc/page/...) context (common sense, recent utterances,…)

Query: “Someone smiling” Caption: “A man watching his daughter take her first step” Help find relevant information

Caption: “A man watching his daughter take her first step” How it works in CYC ® (  x) (feelsEmotion x Happiness Positive) (  x,y) (and (father x y) (gender x Female) (sees x y) (walking Logical Inference (deduction) Help find relevant information Query: “Someone smiling”

(  x) (feelsEmotion x Happiness Positive) (  x,y) (and (father x y) (gender x Female) (sees x y) (walking Logical Inference (deduction) Help find relevant information How it works in CYC ®

Query: “Show me pictures of strong and adventurous people” Caption: “A man climbing a rock face”

Find/clean (consistency-check) info.

Combine info. from n sources Back & forth clarification dialogue Find/clean (consistency-check) info.

Combine info. from n sources Back & forth clarification dialogue Find/clean (consistency-check) info.

you! HAL Combine info. from n sources DB 1 DB 5 DB 2 DB 6 DB 3 DB 4 DB 7 DB 8 DB 1 DB 5 DB 2 DB 6 DB 3 DB 4 DB 7 DB 8 C YC

Combine info. from n sources “Which hit TV shows from the past ten years have starred two people with the same astrological sign?”

DB 1 DB 5 DB 2 DB 6 DB 3 DB 4 DB 7 DB 8 DB 1 DB 5 DB 2 DB 6 DB 3 DB 4 DB 7 DB 8 C YC combine info. from n sources

find info. by inference (+KB) combine info. from n sources back & forth clarification dialogue

find info. by inference (+KB) combine info. from n sources back & forth clarification dialogue

ELIZA: Rogerian Psychiatrist (1965 Joe Weizenbaum, MIT) Carl Rogers advocated reflection Patient: “I swear a lot.” “How do you feel about the fact that you swear a lot?” Counted a lot on anthropomorphism Count on patient-to-doctor respect/awe/… Patient: “My dog’s mother died recently.” “Tell me more about your mother.”

“blah blah blah mother blah blah blah” ELIZA: Rogerian Psychiatrist Patient: “My dog’s mother died recently.” “Tell me more about your mother.”

ALICE JUDGE11[9:26:0]I WILL ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS PROGRAM[9:26:0]Do you think your plan will succeed? JUDGE11[9:26:35]WHERE IS SUE’S NOSE WHEN SUE IS IN HER HOUSE PROGRAM[9:26:35] Try searching the World Wide Web. JUDGE11[9:27:25]HOW IS THE FATHER OF ANDY S MOTHER RELATED TO ANDY PROGRAM[9:27:25]Fine as far as I know.

find info. by inference (+KB) combine info. from n sources back & forth clarification dialogue Why has NLU advanced so little in 35 years? It requires having lots of knowledge Full understanding or bust

Natural Language Understanding requires having lots of knowledge 1.The pen is in the box. The box is in the pen. 2. The police watched the demonstrators… …because they feared violence. …because they advocated violence.

Natural Language Understanding requires having lots of knowledge 3.Mary and Sue are sisters. Mary and Sue are mothers. 4. The White House announced today that...

Natural Language Understanding requires having lots of knowledge 5.Every American has a mother. Every American has a president. 6. John saw his brother skiing on TV. The fool didn’t have a coat on! The fool didn’t recognize him!

LenatPessimisticOptimistic Pessimistic The Rest of the World A I : Dodo or Phoenix ?

No CYC CYC What Changed ? Codifying and formalizing (in machine-manipulable form) the millions of the things that we assume everyone knows

C YC Bridges the “Knowledge Gap” upper ontology task-specific knowledge HUMMV’s lose 18% traction in 4-inch-deep mud Water is wet Vehicles slow down in bad weather intermediate theories

How will we get that knowledge? amount known rate of learning learning by discovery learning via natural language codify & enter each piece of knowledge, by hand CYC 400 person-years 15 realtime years $40 million Frontier of human knowledge

Lessons Learned 1. Use an expressive language, to represent knowledge. (n th -order predicate calculus, rather than frames or C ++ etc.) 2. Separate the epistemological problem (what it should know) from the heuristic problem (how to reason very efficiently). 3. Sacrifice completeness; do resource-limited best-first search. 4. Tolerate and even embrace redundancy as a useful heuristic. 5. Beware of “made-up” probabilities for everyday assertions. 6. Reasoning is default; gather and weigh pro/con arguments. 7. Give up on global consistency; only insist on local consistency. Reason with facts nearby in an n-dimensional “context space.”

C YC effort: “automating the white space” C YC is a power source, not an application C YC applications Announcement “It’s just common sense”

C YC C YC Applications NLU/Speech (incl. prosody) –conversable appliances –games and training simulations Semantic integration of n SIS’s in linear time –databases, spreadsheets, web pages, forms Security : scan a network, model it in the KB –reason about it: discover viable multi-step attacks, including cyber- and macro-level vulnerabilities, and answer “what-if” questions about any changes

C YC C YC Applications C YCORP :

content (logical representation of doc/page/...) context (common sense, recent utterances,…) ANNOUNCEMENT

O PEN C YC: Dimension 1 upper ontology task-specific knowledge HUMMV’s lose 18% traction in 4-inch-deep mud Water is wet Vehicles slow down in bad weather intermediate theories (weather, paths, emotions,…) topics depth contexts

O PEN C YC: Dimension 2 the names of the terms (constants) explanatory (NL) comments for each term taxonomic relations (element-of, supersets,...) constraints (argument-types, disjointness,…) most fundamental facts about each term most fundamental rules about each term lesser-known non-proprietary facts and rules

O PEN C YC: Dimension 3 inspect online at download flat file of terms, assertions, etc. download DAML/XML file of that content download a version with a browser/navigator download a version with an editor/transcriptor download a version with collaboration toolbox download a version with full RKF tool support

O PEN C YC: Dimension 4 free for internal R&D only free internal deployment free use in external products/services –public license (such as Apache or GNU GPL)

O PEN C YC: Quarterly Releases Each release will move content forward one “click” in one or more dimensions Each existing piece of Cyc will eventually move through this process, all the way to public (GPL) Each (sub)context will be eventually be released Each topic will eventually be released Each topic will be released in more detail Each OE tool will eventually be released –incl. NL dialogue tools; incl. each covered language

O PEN C YC: Release #1 (and 0.9) Release 1.0: JULY 1, 2001 Various offerings throughout the 4 dimensions Pre-alpha v 0.9 is available now –3,000 most fundamental terms. 30,000 assertions –very broad, not very detailed, “NY Times” context –terms, taxonomy, constraints (not rules) –browse or download a flat file; no OE tools released –public use (free commercial use)

O PEN C YC: Administration Managed by OpenCyc.org –coordination point for new terms/constraints/rules –determination of release content, each quarter, based on maturity and stability of that content Cycorp will continue to develop Cyc, and make ever more content available to OpenCyc.org Cycorp will develop and aggressively market applications of Cyc based on OpenCyc.org

O PEN C YC: More Information check out the latest news on similarly, for more information about C YC in general, and using it as a semantic interlingua press conference here on Tuesday 10:30am Level 3, Room 4B. Text of the press release will be available on our website