Automatic Construction of Inference-Supporting Knowledge Bases

While there has been tremendous progress in automatic database population in recent years, most of human knowledge does not naturally fit into a database form. For example, knowledge that "metal objects can conduct electricity " or "animals grow fur to help them stay warm " requires a substantially different approach to both acquisition and representation. This kind of knowledge is important because it can support inference e.g., (with some associated confidence) if an object is made of metal then it can conduct electricity; if an animal grows fur then it will stay warm. If we want our AI systems to understand and reason about the world, then acquisition of this kind of inferential knowledge is essential. In this paper, we describe our work on automatically constructing an inferential knowledge base, and applying it to a question-answering task. Rather than trying to induce rules from examples, or enter them by hand, our goal is to acquire much of this knowledge directly from text. Our premise is that much inferential knowledge is written down explicitly, in particular in textbooks, and can be extracted with reasonable reliability. We describe several challenges that this approach poses, and innovative, partial solutions that we have developed. Finally we speculate on the longer-term evolution of this work. 1