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CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure

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Douglas B. LenatAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 38, Issue 11

Pages 33 - 38

https://doi.org/10.1145/219717.219745

Published: 01 November 1995 Publication History

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Abstract

Since 1984, a person-century of effort has gone into building CYC, a universal schema of roughly 10⁵ general concepts spanning human reality. Most of the time has been spent codifying knowledge about these concepts; approximately 10⁶ commonsense axioms have been handcrafted for and entered into CYC's knowledge base, and millions more have been inferred and cached by CYC. This article examines the fundamental assumptions of doing such a large-scale project, reviews the technical lessons learned by the developers, and surveys the range of applications that are or soon will be enabled by the technology.

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CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure

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Reviews

Reviewer: Giuseppina Carla Gini

The CYC project was established in 1984 as a ten-year project aimed at building a generic knowledge-based system expressing commonsense knowledge as used in almost all aspects of everyday life. The long development time of this project is peculiar, because the applications of the system have just started to appear, and it is still questionable whether they will significantly benefit from the whole system. This paper presents the status of the implementation and the first trials of using the system for applications. The technical description notes that the developers had to change their minds more than once in order to be able to express, as rapidly as possible, general concepts that are now ready. Applications are indicated in creating a user model for Mosaic pages, in better uses of word processors, in extending the functionality of email, and so on. This appears to be the largest knowledge base so far built, with orders of magnitude larg<__?__Pub Caret>er than any other. Is CYC necessary__?__ The author recognizes that it is impossible to answer that question now.

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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 38, Issue 11

Nov. 1995

102 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/219717

Editor:
Jacques Cohen

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 November 1995

Published in CACM Volume 38, Issue 11

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Laukaitis A(2024)Reversal of the Word Sense Disambiguation Task Using a Deep Learning ModelApplied Sciences10.3390/app1413555014:13(5550)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14135550
Duan YTang JXu HLiu CZeng W(2024)Commonsense-Guided Inductive Relation Prediction with Dual Attention MechanismApplied Sciences10.3390/app1405204414:5(2044)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
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Abstract

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Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Cyc: A Midterm Report

Sub-symbolic mapping of Cyc microtheories in data-driven "conceptual" spaces

Tucking RCC in Cyc's ontological bed

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