Sam, Cathy and I have been developing an algorithm created in early 2008 by Olena and Cathy to a point where it not only finds equivalent Wikipedia articles for existing Cyc concepts, but also discovers new concepts and adds them to the knowledge base. Discovery of new concepts is achieved by using a combination of Cyc’s inference engine, automated semantic disambiguation methods developed at the University of Waikato Digital Libraries Lab, Wikipedia’s category structure and infobox information, and parsing the first sentences of Wikipedia articles.

We need volunteers to help us evaluate our data. The evaluation will only take about 25 minutes of your time, is straightforward, and quite interesting!

The aim of the evaluation is to determine whether our algorithm is smart as you are: whether it is as good as you are at saying which two concepts are related, and in what way.

Completing an evaluation will not only help us tremendously, it’ll also put you in the draw to win a US$25 Amazon.com voucher!

What is Cyc?

Cyc is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology of common-sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling computers to perform human-like reasoning.

To learn more, read this see Cyc’s Wikipedia Entry, or visit Cycorp.

UPDATE: The evaluation is finished! Results have been made available here.

Tags: Cyc, Research, Wikipedia

The following are the exact steps I took to get OpenCyc running in Ubuntu 8.10. Without this thread I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

1) Install Java. In a Terminal:

~$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

2) Download OpenCyc

3) Unpack the downloaded file and move the folder to whatever directory

4) Within the OpenCyc folder, locate the “scripts” folder and open it. Open each script in Gedit and change the first line from*:

#!/bin/sh
to:
SHELL = /bin/bash

*Taken from DashAsBinSh.

5) In a Terminal, cd to the OpenCyc/scripts directory, then do:

(for 64 bit)

~$ echo SuSE-9.2-x86_64 > platform-override.txt

(for 32 bit)

~$ echo SuSE-9.2-x86_32 > platform-override.txt

Finally:

~$ ./run.sh

Note that the first time OpenCyc is run you may be in for a long wait – it took about 10~15 minutes on my laptop.

When it is finally finished loading, point a browser to:

Tags: AI - 人工智能, Cyc, OpenCyc, Tutorial - 教程, Ubuntu