Turing's Dream and the Knowledge Challenge

Abstract

There is a set of clear-cut challenges, all centering around knowledge, that have received insufficient attention in AI, and whose solution could bring the realization of Turing's dream - the dream of a machine we can talk with just like a person, and which is therefore (at least) our intellectual equal. These challenges have to do with the representation of linguistically expressible knowledge, the role of knowledge in language understanding, the use of knowledge for several sorts of commonsense reasoning, and knowledge accumulation. Concerning the last topic, I briefly present preliminary results of some of our recent efforts to extract shallow general knowledge about the world from large text corpora.