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Re:Wild Ideas by mjn on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @04:21AM (#6165422)
Two other approaches, a bit messier but with bigger coverage:

* ConceptNet (http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/), I think the first major attempt at a "messier" crowdsourced commonsense-facts database. Not a carefully designed hierarchical ontology like Cyc, but rather a large set of lightly curated statements about natural-language nouns and verbs. Has the pros and cons you might expect: better coverage, and easier to use, but less precision and a lot of ambiguity due to polysemy.

* CMU's "Read the Web" (http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/) and U. Washington's "Open IE" (http://openie.cs.washington.edu/), both projects that combine a shallow-parsing fact-extractor with web-scale crawling. They are truly gigantic, but the accuracy is not very high.

Re:Wild Ideas by arethuza on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @05:42AM (#6165645)
Cool - it's a long time since I paid much attention - I did research on commonsense qualitative models of engineering domains and that led to a personal interest in the wider issues of commonsense reasoning but at that time (early 90s) I ended up deeply skeptical of the approaches that were common then (in my case mostly various qualitative/sorted/temporal logics).