VAL@SU-AI.ARPA (Vladimir Lifschitz) (03/03/86)
Commonsense Knowledge in the TACITUS Project Jerry R. Hobbs Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International Thursday, March 6, 4pm MJH252 In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called ``commonsense metaphysics''. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, scales, cycles, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this talk I will discuss our methodological principles, such as aiming for the maximum abstraction possible in order to accommodate metaphor and analogy, and I will describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating.