True Knowledge - Blog

self-awareness in True Knowledge?

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

Knowledge added this week

There's been lots of knowledge going in this week!  We've been mining Wikipedia for the past couple of month and we've brought about a million objects in so far.  This week the import has given us 183133 new facts about video games (a popular subject for questions from our beta testers), and also lots of new locomotives, people, sieges etc.

Now the first wave of the Wikipedia import is drawing to a close, we're starting to go back over the things we imported earlier and fill them out with more detail.  Over the next week we'll be bringing in a lot of new facts about the existing TV series, radio stations, video games and soccer players.

The users have been working hard too.  Here are the top five beta testers of the week:

1. Crittelmeyer - 669 facts
2. Emathews - 123 facts
3. Ferdf - 82 facts
4. Simtel - 49 facts
5. Jimbeta - 49 facts

It's no surprise to see Chris (1) at the top - he's been slaving to get all possible academic majors into the system.  Eric (2) added the company Mercury Technology Labs and created [venture creation company] as a class to contain it.  Fernanda (3) continued her good work on basketball.  Simtel (4) added Northern Italy and the unit of frequency "bits per second".  Jim (5) is a brand new user - he only appeared in the logs yesterday - so he did well to get into the top five by telling us things about Ireland.

Other users have been helping out too - Sabbir (sarahman) has provided some general issues to think about and regular user Mindbleed added some movie award winners.

Here inside the company we've been working hard to get questions working.  A few of the new questions that got nailed this week are:

• When did the telephone get invented?
• List the wives of Henry the Eighth
• Was John Harvard a Cambridge University graduate?
• What happened in 1066?
• What is the population of the state that Arnie governs?

A wordle for the weekend!

I just created a Wordle with a list of the most frequently used words that feature in questions put to True Knowledge over the last month.

The more often a word was used in questions the larger it appears in the images (or wordles) below.

This first one has had a list of very common English words removed from the data (e.g. a, is, and, etc):

Presidents and basketball seem to be popular topics.

And this one has the common words left in:

Makes you wonder how hard it would be to communicate without the common words...maybe I should try for a day!  Have good weekend ;-)

jobs jobs jobs

Having just closed our funding round, we are growing fast and are now actively recruiting software engineers, product specialists and for many other key roles. The full list (and more information) is here:

     http://www.trueknowledge.com/jobs/

This is a really exciting time to join us and we want to hear from anyone who would like to work with us on the future of search.

All vacancies are based in our Cambridge, UK headquarters (less than an hour north of London). Please spread the word!