Constructing Broad-Coverage Knowledge Repositories by Collecting Knowledge from Volunteer Contributors

February 18, 2005
Timothy Chklovski | USC/ISI

Availability of broad-coverage knowledge repositories can potentially enable the next generation of artificial intelligence and natural language understanding applications. An emerging approach to constructing such repositories is by collecting them from volunteer contributors. Such mass collaboration approach allows posing finely constrained or extensively contextual questions as well as extensive validation of knowledge. However, it is most effective only if we can figure out how to guide and manage the effort of the contributors.

This talks will cover:

Empirical data on quality of the knowledge collected in a representative system,
Types of knowledge which collection from volunteers should target
Methods of collecting more interpretable knowledge,
Methods for incenting contributors to give better contributions, and
Present a high-level view on management (collection and refinement steps) needed to increase quality and coverage of the collected knowledge repository.

Speaker Details

Dr. Timothy Chklovski is a research scientist at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (USC/ISI). Dr. Chklovski’s interests include software tools for cognitive augmentation, construction of broad-coverage knowledge repositories (via collection from volunteer contributors and text extraction). He has been involved in development of several systems for collecting knowledge from volunteers (Learner, Learner2, 1001 Paraphrases, Open Mind Word Expert), and text mining (VerbOcean). Dr. Chklovski received his PhD in artificial intelligence from MIT. His thesis concerned using analogical reasoning to formulate plausible knowledge acquisition questions to be posed to volunteer contributors. Dr. Chklovski has also co-founded and ran aQuery, a document understanding company which automatically generated overviews of topics of interest from web documents. Publications, etc are available at http://www.isi.edu/~timc