Representations of commonsense knowledge: Response to the reviews

✍ Scribed by Ernest Davis

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 248 KB
• Volume: 61
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3702
• DOI: 10.1016/0004-3702(93)90101-g

✦ Synopsis

My friend Dan Weld is so kind in his review that my only possible response is to thank him for his pleasant words.

William Croft is certainly correct in saying that "AI research on commonsense reasoning could benefit from input from linguistic semantics". I am grateful for the overview of linguistic studies of commonsense concepts and the pointers to the literature given in his review. Unquestionably, a thorough and systematic survey of this area of research would be of inestimable value to the KR community.

I thought Mark Tuttle's review insightful and perceptive, and I thank him for his general enthusiasm and sympathy for the aims and contents of my book. I would like to respond to a few points he raised, where I think that either we disagree or we don't understand one another.

In Section 6.1, Tuttle takes me to task for being unwilling to say, "You know, we don't seem to know much about what commonsense is or how it works, but here are some interesting and important axioms and manipulations that you should know about". Certainly I agree 100 per cent with this categorization of the field and of my book, and I am rather surprised and disappointed that this didn't come through. Actually, I thought I had said it again and again. On page viii, I said that we are just scratching *Thanks to Leora Morgenstern for helpful criticisms and comments.