ThoughtTreasure


ThoughtTreasure is a commonsense knowledge base and architecture for natural language processing.
It contains both declarative and procedural
knowledge.

Declarative knowledge

ThoughtTreasure's knowledge base
consists of concepts, which are
linked to one another by assertions.
An assertion is represented in the form
@timestamp:timestamp|

Some examples of assertions in ThoughtTreasure are:

@19770120:19810120|

ThoughtTreasure contains a total of
27,000 concepts and 51,000 assertions.
It has an upper ontology and several
domain-specific lower ontologies such as for clothing,
food, and music.
Each concept is associated with zero or more lexical entries.
Two languages are supported: English and French.
ThoughtTreasure has 35,000 English lexical entries and
21,000 French lexical entries.
In addition to open-class lexical entries such as
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, ThoughtTreasure
also contains closed-class lexical entries such as
conjunctions, determiners, interjections,
prepositions, and pronouns. It also contains a dictionary
of names.
Zero or more features are attached to each lexical entry.
There are 118 features.
Examples are ZEROART,
SING, FML, CAN, ENG, and N
.
Argument structure is provided for verbs.
For example, the argument structure for the concept
walk-into
is
*> S ---- into IO

ThoughtTreasure contains 93 scripts, or
representations of typical activities.
ThoughtTreasure contains 29 grids, which represent the arrangement of
objects in typical locations such as hotel rooms, kitchens, and
theaters. Grids are connected together by wormholes.

Procedural knowledge

ThoughtTreasure includes a planning agency for achieving
goals in a simulated world and an
understanding agency for understanding stories and
asking and answering questions.
ThoughtTreasure contains the following procedures
for natural language processing:
ThoughtTreasure contains the following procedures
that deal with space:
It contains operations dealing with parts and wholes of objects,
grids,
large space,
and
nested space.
Other procedures in ThoughtTreasure include:
ThoughtTreasure can be used to add common sense to applications by using its knowledge base or by communicating with a ThoughtTreasure server.
ThoughtTreasure has been used to build various applications such as a DJ's assistant, a movie review question answering program, and a smart calendar.

History

ThoughtTreasure was begun by Erik Mueller in December 1993.
The first version was released on April 28, 1996. Mueller established the company Signiform in 1997 to pursue commercial applications of ThoughtTreasure. However, the company was unsuccessful and Signiform closed its doors in 2000.
In 2000, Erik Mueller moved to IBM Research, where he was a member of the
team that developed Watson.
On July 31, 2015, ThoughtTreasure was made available on GitHub.