A semi-automated method for acquisition of common-sense and inferentialist knowledge

Abstract

This paper presents a semi-automated method for the acquisition of common-sense and inferentialist concepts in Portuguese. Its innovative feature is a module of reasoning over the pre-existing knowledge that aims to offer original content to the user, helping in the expression of semantic relationships and validation of new concepts. This reasoning process is based on heuristics and syntactic analysis of noun phrases. A qualitative evaluation with users who interacted with the system built on the proposed method showed that the interactions made in the process of knowledge acquisition are more productive since the user is reminded about semantic relations and common-sense knowledge about the new concepts. Keywords Knowledge acquisition method • Common-sense knowledge • Inferentialist knowledge 1 Introduction Common-sense knowledge consists of spatial, physical, social, temporal and psychological facts, and knowledge, possessed by most people, which are fruits of daily life This is a revised and extended version of a previous paper that appeared at STIL 2011, the 8th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology.