Robert Speer

ConceptNet 5: A Large Semantic Network for Relational Knowledge

ConceptNet is a knowledge representation project, providing a large semantic graph that describes general human knowledge and how it is expressed in natural language. Here we present the latest iteration, ConceptNet 5, with a focus on its fundamental design decisions and ways to interoperate with it.

An interface for targeted collection of common sense knowledge using a mixture model

We present a game-based interface for acquiring common sense knowledge. In addition to being interactive and entertaining, our interface guides the knowledge acquisition process to learn about the most salient characteristics of a particular concept. We use statistical classification methods to discover the most informative characteristics in the Open Mind Common Sense knowledge base, and use these characteristics to play a game of 20 Questions with the user. Our interface also allows users to enter knowledge more quickly than a more traditional knowledge-acquisition interface. An evaluation showed that users enjoyed the game and that it increased the speed of knowledge acquisition.

Narratarium: An Immersive Storytelling Environment

The Narratarium Colorizer device receives either keyboard input or speech recognition input and uses natural language processing to extract key terms. The terms are queried for in a knowledge base of words and associated colors, created by leveraging the Open Mind Common Sense database and ConceptNet. The system outputs a continually changing color display, which is projected uniformly throughout the room using a custom designed curved mirror projection system.

Visualizing common sense connections with Luminoso

We present Luminoso, a tool that helps researchers to visualize and understand a dimensionality-reduced semantic space based on textual information by exploring it interactively. It streamlines the process of creating such a space by taking input from a directory of text documents, and optionally including common-sense background information. This interface is useful for interactively discovering trends in a text corpus, such as free-text responses to a survey. We discuss a case study about restaurant reviews to show how Luminoso can be used for opinion mining.