Verbosity, and one meeeelion sentences

How did we just get nearly 200,000 new statements in Open Mind Common Sense?

We've just imported a whole lot of data from Verbosity, one of Luis von Ahn's Games with a Purpose. Verbosity collects common sense knowledge through a game: one person is given a word, and needs to get the other person to guess that word by listing common-sense facts about it.

The data is rather noisy in places, but after some filtering, we've got a list of new statements about as reliable as the other score-1 statements in OMCS. These include a number of useful "is not" statements, describing things that are different, which we've never prompted for on OMCS before, as well as many examples of a new relation, "SimilarSize", expressing the statement "X is about the same size as Y".

A side effect of this is that it's pushed our total sentence count for English over one million! Of those, we can parse about 542,600 so far (we've still got a lot left to try to parse from the original Open Mind), and those translate to about 504,700 unique assertions in ConceptNet.

Thank you to all our contributors (especially those who are patient enough to try to deal with our current web site), and to all the players of Verbosity!

Welcome back, Catherine Havasi!

Catherine Havasi co-created the Open Mind Common Sense project, as an undergraduate researcher working with Push Singh way back in 1999. For the last five years, she's been working on a doctorate in computational linguistics at Brandeis University. She's been doing a lot of cross-campus research with this group.

Last month, she finally earned her Ph.D (congratulations!). Now, she's returned to the Media Lab as a post-doc, where she'll once again be able to work on Open Mind and its applications full time. It's great to have her as an official part of the group again!