By William Tunstall-Pedoe
At True Knowledge we are building a platform that can answer natural language questions on any topic.
Unlike most search systems which do a statistical match with documents, our system gives direct answers to questions drawn from facts in a structured knowledge base stored in a form that the system can understand.
Futhermore, the system can infer new answers to questions using reasoning: answering questions it may never have seen before.
We were recently benchmarking the current capabilities of our platform by passing through it many thousands of general questions.
For each question given to it, the system responded either with an answer or to say it didn't understand or didn't know. In the last two cases, users of our platform (including ourselves) can fail over to alternative search results - e.g. conventional keyword search. For this reason, it is important that when the system decides it can answer, it gets it right.
On reviewing the results, one of the questions was "How old am I?" which clearly did not contain enough information for an answer to be given. However, our system was responding "3 years, 0 months"!
On investigation of this "bug", we discovered the cause. The benchmarking script had been set to run as user trueknowledge and in the Knowledge Base were the following facts:
- True Knowledge is the true identity of user trueknowledge
- True Knowledge was founded in August 2005
- 'was founded in' is a more specific form of the concept 'was created on'
and it knew that age could be calculated by working out the elapsed time since an entity's creation
By successfully processing the question and reasoning with these facts, the system was quite correctly (but unexpectedly) answering with its own age! This also taught us that we, as a company, have just had our third anniversary (all the human staff here had failed to notice).
If our 'baby' can be this clever at a mere three years of age, we can't wait to find out what it will be capable of when it's four! Please help us teach it more

