1. An Interactive Dialogue System for Knowledge Acquisition in Cyc
Michael Witbrock
9/16/2018
IJCAI 2003

2. Cyc: Large Scale Knowledge Base
>3,000 Microtheories
>1,600,000 Assertions
Cyc
>200,000 Rules
>30,000 Relations
>120,000 Concepts
9/16/2018

3. codify & enter each piece of knowledge, by hand
How did CYC get this far?
Large effort to date
19 realtime years
substantial investment
1984
2003
learning via
natural language
learning by discovery
rate of learning
Frontier of human knowledge
codify & enter each piece of knowledge, by hand
CYC
amount known

4. Analogy Developer (similarTo RingoStarr JerryAllison)
(isa JerryAllison FamousHuman)
(mostNotableIsa JerryAllison
(PlayerOfInstrumentFn DrumInstrument))
(hasMembers TheBeatles-MusicGroup JerryAllison)
(authorOfSong JerryAllison OctopussGarden-TheSong)
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5. Phrase Disambiguator
(residesInRegion JerryAllison Hillsboro)
(originallyFromRegion JerryAllison Hillsboro)
(from-UnderspecifiedLocation JerryAllison Hillsboro)
9/16/2018

6. Unknown Term
(isa PeggySue Song-CW)
9/16/2018

7. Precision Suggestor (isa JerryAllison
(PlayerOfInstrumentFn DrumInstrument))
(occupation JerryAllison
9/16/2018

8. Concept Refinement Interview
(playsInstrumentInMusicalGroup JerryAllison ?EXISTING-OBJECT-TYPE ?MUSICAL-PERFORMANCE-ORGANIZATION)
9/16/2018

9. Concept Refinement Interview: Why I asked
(aunts PeggySue-1 ?PERSON)
(wife JerryAllison PeggySue-1)
(implies
(and (aunts ?Z ?Y) (wife ?X ?Y))
(uncles ?Z ?X))
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10. Concept Refinement Interview: Induction
(isa JerryAllison ?NATIONALITY)
9/16/2018

11. Mixed-Initiative Dialogue
User
Interaction
Agenda KE
Rules
Knowledge
Base
Statement
Command
Question
Deductions
Inductions
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12. Progress in Knowledge Entry Efficiency50 40 30 20 10
Assertions per Hour
Manual KE
Feasibility Study
RKF Year 1
RKF Year 2
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13. Where do we want to go next?
Never make the user wait
Support both rapid and diligent parsing.
Improve ambiguity resolution
Deferred resolution by ambiguity tolerance
Anaphor resolution
Focus-based resolution
Transparent, correctable eager resolution
Conversational goals
9/16/2018

14. Design Goal: Interlocutor History / Status Text / Template Entry
What is “The World Health Organization”?
What is “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”?
By what medium was the announcement made?
What type of pathogen was the new pathogen?
Suggestions for Efficient Knowledge Entry
Graphical View of Added Knowledge

15. Parse Pipeline Syntactic Parser Semantic Parser Reformulator Language
Natural
Tree
Parse
Underspecified
Formula
Semantic
Formula
Semantic
Assertible
Knowledge
Base
9/16/2018

16. Advanced parsing and discourse modeling
Interaction with Cyc should be a conversation that the user controls. Cyc’s responses should be:
Relevant – Track thread and overall goals
Correctable – Detect, examine, correct
Learned – Do better next time
Move to declarative representation and use inference more
Parsing and resolution rules are more transparent, flexible, and learnable
Deferred and inter-sentential resolution with ambiguity tolerance
User/Cyc relationship as teacher/student (or student/teacher)
9/16/2018