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On Beliefs

Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Many of our beliefs should be regarded as tentative and should be subject to revision (or elimination) based on rigorous evaluation -- just like scientific theories are.
-- Nils J. Nilsson. Understanding Beliefs, MIT Press, 2014.

On Belief Engine - Declarative

Belief Engine - Declarative is going towards the goal of a scientific quest on a Web of Evolving Declarative Beliefs for Human Being and Cognitive Robotics. It is a branch of Belief Engine, which is a Web of various declarative beliefs extracted and generated from various sources, mainly on the World Wide Web. It is designed to be used by various cognitive robotics, while the nature of Belief Engine enables it to be used in other knowledge processing and language understanding applications.

Belief Representation

The declarative beliefs are designed to be represented in triples following the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Ontology Web Language (OWL) standards. The current online beliefs are conceptual common sense knowledge with a belief value.

Conceptual Common Sense Beliefs (CCSB) are generated through conceptualization on subjects and objects of triples form knowledge extracted from various sources (e.g. Baidu Encyclopedia, Hudong Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia). Namely, each belief in the current Belief Engine is composed of two concepts (i.e. subject and object), one binary relation, and a belief value (ranging from 0 to 1). The belief values are based on statistical analysis of conceptual common sense knowledge generated through entity conceptualization. Instance level beliefs will also be released soon.

Here we give some examples on CCSB. "Person, Nationality, Country" with a belief value of "1" indicates that the Belief Engine belives very much that a person's nationality can be a country. While "Sports player, Occupation, Country" with a belief value "0.067" indicates that the Belief Engine believes a sports player's occupation is very unlikely to be a country (more possibly, should be a sports game or other occupation).

Recent Updates for Belief Engine - Declarative

The current version of Belief Engine - Declarative is with two sources. One of them is declarative knowledge from our previous work CASIA-KB, a declarative semantic knowledge base built with extracted knowledge from Baidu Encyclopedia, Hudong Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia (with entity links among different knowledge sources). And the other is Conceptual Common Sense Declarative Belifes (conceptual common sense declarative knowledge with belief values) generated based on knowledge from CASIA-KB.

Major Updates:

Update Time	Update Contents
2017-02-22	With the new philosophy of Belief Engine, we have the first release of Conceptual Common Sense Declarative Belifes (Each conceptual common sense declarative knowledge triple is with a belief value). The Conceptual Common Sense knowledge is generated based on entity conceptualization of encyclopedia knowledge from our previous work CASIA-KB. The belief values are from statistical analysis on the generated Conceptual Common Sense knowledge.
2017-01-19	The first version of Belief Engine is released, mainly based on CASIA-KB, a multi-source semantic knowledge base mainly built from Web encyclopedias (Baidu encyclopedia, Hudong encyclopedia, and Wikipedia). The major updates focus on releasing both English and Chinese vesion of the knowledge base.
2014-08-11	The application of CASIA-KB to automatic tourist attraction recommendations based on semantic relatedness [Link].
2013-11-28	The release of CASIA-KB as well as some applications [Link]
2013-11-15	Entity linking from CASIA-KB to microblog posts. [Link]
2013-10-13	Entity conceptualization and its applications based on CASIA-KB. [Link]
2012-12-07	The release of a Chinese semantic knowledge base built from Baidu Encyclopedia, and related statistical analysis from the complex network and human dynamics point of view. [Link]

 

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