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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

causenet.org

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Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#5

Post by bbor »

> CauseNet aims at creating a causal knowledge base that comprises all human causal knowledge and to separate it from mere causal beliefs

Pretty bold to use a picture of philosophers as your splash page and then make a casual claim like this. To say the least, this is an impossible task!

The tech looks cool and I'm excited to see how I might be able to work it into my stuff and/or contribute. But I'd encourage the authors to reign in the rhetoric...

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#6

Post by kolektiv »

pavlov wrote: post #4

The sample set contains: { "causal_relation": { "cause": { "concept": "boom" }, "effect": { "concept": "bust" } } } It's practically a hedge-fund-in-a-box.

Plus, regardless of what you might think of how valid that connection is, what they're actually collecting, absent any kind of mechanism, is a set of all apparent correlations...

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#7

Post by maweki »

It's nice to see more semantic web experiments. I always wanted to do more reasoning with ontologies, etc., and it's such an amazing idea, to reference objects/persons/locations/concepts from the real world with uris and just add labeled arrows between them.

This is such a cool schemaless approach and has so much potential for open data linking, classical reasoning, LLM reasoning. But open data (together with RSS) has been dead for a while as all big companies have become just data hoarders. And frankly, while the concept and the possibilities are so cool, the graph databases are just not that fast and also not fun to program.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#8

Post by thicknavyrain »

I know it's a reductive take to point to a single mistake and act like the whole project might be a bit futile (maybe it's a rarity) but this example in their sample is really quite awful if the idea is to give AI better epistemics:

    {
        "causal_relation": {
            "cause": {
                "concept": "vaccines"
            },
            "effect": {
                "concept": "autism"
            }
        }
    },
... seriously? Then again, they do say these are just "causal beliefs" expressed on the internet, but seems like some stronger filtering of which beliefs to adopt ought to be exercised for an downstream usecase.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#10

Post by kolektiv »

thicknavyrain wrote: post #8

I know it's a reductive take to point to a single mistake and act like the whole project might be a bit futile (maybe it's a rarity) but this example in their sample is really quite awful if the idea is to give AI better epistemics: { "causal_relation": { "cause": { "concept": "vaccines" }, "effect": { "concept": "autism" } } }, ... seriously? Then again, they do say these are just "causal beliefs" expressed on the i…

Oh, ouch, yeah. We already know that misinformation tends to get amplified, the last thing we need is a starting point full of harmful misinformation. There are lots of "causal beliefs" on the internet that should have no place in any kind of general dataset.
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