A commonsense approach to story understanding

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Williams, Bryan Michael
Other Authors: Patrick Henry Winston and Henry Lieberman.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113449
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author Williams, Bryan Michael
author2 Patrick Henry Winston and Henry Lieberman.
author_facet Patrick Henry Winston and Henry Lieberman.
Williams, Bryan Michael
author_sort Williams, Bryan Michael
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description Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1134492019-04-12T13:51:52Z A commonsense approach to story understanding Williams, Bryan Michael Patrick Henry Winston and Henry Lieberman. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017. This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 105-108). Story understanding is a essential part of human intelligence. Therefore, any complete model of human intelligence must be able to understand stories. Understanding stories requires commonsense knowledge. Many story understanding systems rely on rules to express and manipulate common sense, but the amount of common sense is vast and expressing significant amounts of common sense this way is tedious. Commonsense knowledge bases can help address this problem. My work demonstrates the power of combining a story-understanding system and a commonsense knowledge base. Genesis is a story-understanding system that models aspects of story understanding by reading and analyzing stories written in simple English. I have extended Genesis by incorporating ConceptNet, a large knowledge base of common sense, into its processing. Now, Genesis not only has access to the dozens of inference rules provided by Genesis users, but also tens of thousands of goal-related assertions provided by contributors to ConceptNet. Genesis uses ConceptNet's knowledge to infer characters' goals, in some cases allowing Genesis to understand stories with few or even zero user-defined rules. Genesis can now infer relevant events and connections never explicitly stated in the story in a manner unprecedented within the space of story understanding and machine reading. Genesis also uses ConceptNet to apply user-defined rules in a commonsense, more flexible fashion, extending the reach of a rule by factors ranging from ten to one hundred. These additions to the Genesis story-understanding system takes steps toward practical AI-enabled systems that provide advice in areas that heavily depend on precedent, including law, medicine, and business. by Bryan Michael Williams. M. Eng. 2018-02-08T15:58:11Z 2018-02-08T15:58:11Z 2017 2017 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113449 1020178484 eng MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 122 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Williams, Bryan Michael
A commonsense approach to story understanding
title A commonsense approach to story understanding
title_full A commonsense approach to story understanding
title_fullStr A commonsense approach to story understanding
title_full_unstemmed A commonsense approach to story understanding
title_short A commonsense approach to story understanding
title_sort commonsense approach to story understanding
topic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113449
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