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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

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

#101

Post by growingkittens »

Organizing all knowledge requires a flexible system of organization (starting with how the categories are organized and accessed, not the data).

Random thoughts about organizing knowledge:

- Categories need fractal structures.

- Categories need to be available as subcategories to other categories as a pattern.

- Words need to be broken down into base concepts and used as patterns.

- Social information and context alter the meaning of words in many cases, so any semantic web without a control system has limited use as an organization tool.

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

#102

Post by tgv »

SilverElfin wrote: post #88
tgv wrote: post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

What is an ontology exactly? I see Palantir talking about it all the time and it just sounds like vague marketing.

It comes from "the knowledge of being," and has been used to describe real-world knowledge representation, in particular hierarchical(-ish) semantic networks in AI since its early days.

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

#103

Post by Jeff_Brown »

lemonwaterlime wrote: post #50
kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a system cannot be both sound a complete Huh, what do you mean by this? There are many sound and complete systems – propositional logic, first-order logic, Presburger arithmetic, the list goes on. These are the basic properties you want from a logical or typing system. (Though, of course, you may compromise if you have other priorities.)

My take is that the GP was implicitly referring to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems with the implication being that a system that reasons completely about all the human topics and itself is not possible. Therefore, you’d need multiple such systems (plural) working in concert.

A collection of systems is itself a system. The theorem would not recognize the distinction.

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

#105

Post by koliber »

Nevermark wrote: post #36
koliber wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. In some cases disease causes death. In others it causes immunity which in turn causes “good health” and postpones death.

Contradictory cause-effect examples, each backed up with data, are a reliable indicator of a class of situations that need a higher chain-effect resolution. Which is directly usable knowledge if you are building out a causal graph. In the meantime, a cause and effect representation isn't limited to only listing one possible effect. A list of alternate disjoint effects, linked to a cause, is also directly usable. Just…

It is my opinion that if we examine any factor closely, it will have multiple disjoint effects. As in nothing is absolutely unilateral in its effects. Some of those effects will depend on certain conditions. If it is possible to specify condition, annotations, and other nuances such as levels of confidence or source of the opinion, such a database might be pretty useful.

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

#107

Post by eloeffler »

kruffalon wrote: post #65

I read it as "casual" rather than "causal", got very dissapointed while reading the article! An inventory of casual knowledge would be really fun, although it's hard to think what it would consist of now that I think about it... There is this concept of "hidden knowledge" about all the things you know at work that no one really thinks about is knowledge so it's hard to let newcomers know about it. But that does sound…

I did, too! And it reminded me of a project idea I had a while ago:

A time traveller's wiki that collects casual knowledge for different times (and different places).

Such as: "Buying a train ticket in Paris in 1972".

But it was a shower thought and it's pretty hard to imagine how this knowledge should be collected and especially presented.

In a way, wikipedia is already doing this by keeping records of articles as they change over the years :)

The article about train tickets wasn't so good as an example but "computer monitor" from 2004 is kind of fun to read :)

Unfortunately, "casual knowledge" is often omitted when writing informative articles. In this example, there is no mention that power buttons are often located somewhere in the back of the monitor, which was good to know in 2004. Also, some monitors are drawing power from the computer, thus they won't power up before the computer will. And speaking of that: You may want to turn of your computer after shutdown!

Edit: This would probably be useful for novelists and filmmakers (in addition to the casual time traveller)

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

#108

Post by kruffalon »

aleatorianator wrote: post #85
kruffalon wrote: post #65

I read it as "casual" rather than "causal", got very dissapointed while reading the article! An inventory of casual knowledge would be really fun, although it's hard to think what it would consist of now that I think about it... There is this concept of "hidden knowledge" about all the things you know at work that no one really thinks about is knowledge so it's hard to let newcomers know about it. But that does sound…

it's as simple as precisely describing "common sense"

Yes, that very simple task :D

But I also wonder if that is actually an equivalent.

I think of "common sense" as think you should know to function well in your current society.

I really don't know what "casual knowledge" would mean. In my head it's some kind of low stakes knowledge for everyday life (but more 'useful' than trivia).

Maybe the order is "common sense", "casual knowledge" and trivia?

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

#109

Post by TomasBM »

rwmj wrote: post #35

Isn't this like Cyc? There have been a couple of interesting articles about that on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43625474 "Obituary for Cyc" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069298 "Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project"

Cyc is hardly [1] mentioned in modern work under the knowledge representation and reasoning umbrella, because most [2] of it was/is unavailable or unknown to most researchers. It's hard to build on something that's primarily marketing material.

[1] I could be wrong, but even those that mention Cyc use it only as a historical example of early work in KRR / symbolic AI. [2] OpenCyc being the small subset which is available, tho I haven't met anyone who worked with it.

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