Common Sense and Folksonomy: Engineering an Intelligent Search System
Mohammad Nauman, Fida Hussain
City University of Science and Information Technology,
Peshawar, Pakistan
{recluze , fidamsse}@gmail.com
Abstract
The massive growth of the Internet has resulted in
increased difficulty in organizing and searching
through the information present on it. Several
strategies have been employed to tackle this problem.
With the coming of Web2.0, user-created data and
sharing of information among peers, community-based
tagging or folksonomy has become the norm for
organization of data on the Internet. The loose
structure of folksonomy has led to ease in
categorization of the huge amounts of information but
has also given rise to some serious problems. Users
tag information based on their own experiences,
preferences and common sense. This leads to
difficulties in search and organization of information
in the long run. In this paper, we argue that since user
common sense has generated both folksonomy and a
corpus of machine common sense, it seems
appropriate that machine common sense be used for
addressing the problem of search in folksonomy. We
outline an architecture for such an operation, develop
a prototype as a proof of concept and describe how
this approach can be extended in the future.
1. Introduction
The Internets massive growth in the past decade
or so has given rise to an information revolution
throughout the world. With the initial increase in
Internets content came search engines and search
techniques grew more and more complicated to
accommodate for the increased amount of information.
With more and more businesses, organizations and
even individuals posting on the web, it became
extremely difficult to locate relevant information.
Until recently, search engines and hand- crafted
directories were the only available solution to this
problem.
With the advent of Web2.0, this problem has
increased manifold. Web2.0 applications include user-
centric publishing and knowledge management
platforms like Wikis, Blogs, and social resource
sharing systems [1]. Now, everyone with an Internet
connection has the ability to share information with
peers and the global audience. Along with Web2.0
came a new technique (dubbed folksonomy) for
organizing the information posted by the users.
Folksonomy (from folk and taxonomy) means
structural representations created by the general public
[1]. It refers to the attachment of tags or labels to
content for the purpose of organizing and searching.
Folksonomy is a flat namespace with no hierarchy and
no direct relationship between its elements [2]. An
ever-increasing number of web services such as
del.icio.us and flickr use folksonomy for the purpose
of organizing content [2]. While tags serve as a very
effective basis for organization of content, they are
nonetheless difficult to search through because of
variances in possible textual representation of concepts
[3]. Because of these variances, it is difficult to
automate the process of searching through
folksonomy.
We argue that folksonomy, by its definition, is
generated through the use of common sense of the
general public. It seems appropriate to use common
sense to search through it. We propose a solution in
which machine common sense can be used to search
through folksonomy in a Web2.0 service.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
First, we give an overview of the problem of search in
folksonomy. Then we describe what machine common
sense is and shed some light on attempts to formalize
it. We describe the Open Mind Common Sense Project
in detail and see how it can be used for application of
common sense. We then outline an architecture for
using machine common sense for search in
folksonomy. Finally, we discuss a prototype developed
as a proof of concept along with ideas about future
work regarding this framework.
2. Problem Overview
2.1. Folksonomy: Community-based Tagging
Several strategies have been used for searching
for information on the web based on the scenario. On
the World Wide Web, the amount of information
present and the evolving nature of this information
make it extremely difficult for a single authority to
classify and sort through. Folksonomy or community-
based tagging suggests itself for classification of
information in such a scenario [3]. It does not
however, come without some drawbacks. The major
problem with tagging information is caused by the
way different individuals would link real-world
concepts with textual representation of these concepts.
This is the problem of polysemy (using the same
words to describe different concepts), synonymy
(using different words to describe the same concept)
and variation in basic levels of categorization [3]. Not
only is this a problem with different users, it is also a
problem of recall. Users may not be able to recall
correctly how they tagged the information a month
earlier. Several strategies have been employed to
address this issue including those based on synonyms
and co-occurrence frequencies. Since these approaches
are all based on lexical analysis of terms instead of
contextual, they have had only moderate levels of
success [4].
Another aspect of the problem is that of ontology.
An ontology is a formal specification of sets of
objects, concepts and other entities about which
knowledge is being expressed and the relationships
that hold among them [5], [6]. Folksonomy is a non-
hierarchical and non-exclusive ontology [7]. While
this is beneficial in many respects, it poses a serious
problem for searching. It creates a fuzzy and
ambiguous boundary between sets of different
concepts. The tags created are heavily reflective of the
authors personal experiences, preferences and skill
level [3]. Searching in this scenario becomes
extremely difficult. Search results ranking is biased
towards content marked with popular tags.
Another problem with folksonomy (which it
shares with traditional search systems) is that even
with the automation of search, the human brain still
has to do much work during the search process. Search
engines/systems do not cater for important search sub-
processes such as examining results, extraction of
information and reflection and iteration on the search
process [8].
A solution to all of these problems is to create a
search system which is better representative of how
the human brain works a search system with
common sense.
2.2. Common Sense
Common sense, in the context of Artificial
Intelligence, is a technical term which refers to the
millions of basic facts and understandings possessed
by most people knowledge machines do not have
[9]. It is this lack of common sense that has caused
machines to fail when presented with an unexpected
situation even though they have always been better
than humans at solving problems which can be
described by fixed parameters and strict rules [10].
Creating machines with common sense is a central
problem of artificial intelligence but is very difficult
for several reasons. These include the difficulty caused
by diversity in varieties, huge amounts of information
and the flexibility requirements posed by such
knowledge [11]. There is also the difficulty in the
broad range of domains involved in common sense
reasoning. An architecture for common sense must
encompass domains which require reasoning about
temporal, spatial, physical, psychological and social
matters [12]. Such an architecture must also include
inference methods regarding negative expertise,
knowledge retrieval and self-reflection [13]. Some of
the attempts at formalizing common sense are
discussed below in Related Work.
3. Related work
3.1. Formalization of Common Sense
The most famous attempts at formalizing common
sense have been WordNet [14], Cyc [15] and the Open
Mind Common Sense project [16].
1) WordNet: is a collection of English language
nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs organized as
synonym sets, each representing a lexical concept.
These synonym sets are linked using relations
described in natural language [14]. WordNet contains
precise definitions of words and their relationships
with each other. It does not however deal with
concepts of common understanding. WordNet, for
example, can be used to deduce the fact that a cat is a
mammal but not that it is also usually a pet [11]. For
this reason, it would not be suitable to use WordNet as
a common sense engine for search on folksonomy.
2) Cyc: is a large-scale project aimed at compiling
a universal schema of common sense information. It
has a large collection of hand crafted and logically
inferred axioms [15]. It currently has over 1.5 million
rules and facts in a logical language called CycL [17].
The drawback of Cyc is that it relies on time and effort
of experts to handle common sense knowledge.
Anyone willing to use Cyc in practical textual
processing applications would have to invest their time
in learning CycL and the Cyc ontology [18].
3) Open Mind Common Sense: is a project aimed
at collecting common sense information from a non-
expert global audience using the World Wide Web as
an interface [16]. The motivating idea behind the Open
Mind project was that common sense by its definition
is information and understanding shared by most of
the people. The general public therefore is the best
source for gathering common sense information. This
is accomplished by engaging thousands of users in an
effort to collect this information through the OMCS
project web site [18].
By analysing the first attempt and building on its
strengths, the creators of Open Mind Common Sense
project designed a more elaborate means of collecting
and processing common sense information Open
Mind Common Sense 2 (OMCS-2) [18].
In lessons learned from OMCS, an important one
is that it is not necessary to first collect complete
common sense knowledge before embarking on the
utilization of the available knowledge bases in
applications [17].
Learning from this, several attempts have been
made to utilize the common sense knowledge base
gathered from OMCS. The most important of these are
the ConceptNet [9] and LifeNet [19] projects at MIT
Media Lab. ConceptNet is the first knowledge base
extracted from the OMCS data. It consists of a
semantic network of concepts associated together
using links such as IsA, SubeventOf, MotivationOf and
PartOf etc. [11] We shall return to a detailed
discussion of ConceptNet in a moment.
In contrast with ConceptNets rule-based
reasoning methods, LifeNets design is based on
probabilistic techniques. It caters for uncertainty in
both the knowledge and in the rules [11]. It is,
however, not clear how these added capabilities of
LifeNet can be put to use for solving the problem of
search in the domain of folksonomy.
4) ConceptNet: ConceptNet is a freely available
common sense reasoning tool kit comprising of over
250,000 elements of common sense knowledge built
using semi structured natural language fragments. It
builds on the simplicity of WordNets ontology of
semantic relations (described using natural language)
and on Cycs diversity of relations and concepts [20].
In essence, it combines the best of both worlds by
creating a powerful and expressive ontology while still
keeping the reasoning and inference logic simple.
The current version of ConceptNet is 2, consisting
of 1.6 million assertions. There are twenty relation-
types in ConceptNet grouped in K-LINES, THINGS,
AGENTS, EVENTS, SPATIAL, CAUSAL, FUNCTIONAL and
AFFECTIVE thematics. Scores are assigned to relations
based on two criteria:
1) Number of utterances in OMCS corpus
(denoted by the f value)
2) Inference from other facts in ConceptNet
(denoted by the i value) [9]
Figure 1 shows an example of concepts and links
as represented in ConceptNet.
OMCS and ConceptNet have successfully been
applied on problems such as natural language
processing [21], photo retrieval [22], and search.
Mobility
Shift Used for
Subevent Of Vehicle
Tire
Drive
IsA
Part Of
Used for
Subevent Of
Get direction
Car Capable Of Travel
Location Of Capable Of Motivation Of
In garage Use patrol See world
Figure 1 Excerpt from ConceptNet showing links from
Car
3.2. Application of Common Sense in Search
The practicality of application of common sense
in applications has been shown by several projects in
the past. Here we give a few examples of how OMCS
has been used to tackle the issue of search on the web.
ARIA is a search system which is used for
retrieval of annotated photos. It uses ConceptNet to
expand the concepts depicted by keywords in the
users query [22].
GOOSE is another search system based on OMCS
which uses common sense to reformulate users
natural language queries into effective keywords [23].
ConSearch works on a different level in the search
problem. It targets the results of a search engine and
groups them together based on similarity of concepts
[8].
While all these applications of common sense are
innovative and robust, they lack one thing: they fail to
utilize sources of information other than the common
sense corpus itself. In the following section, we
propose an approach which, in addition to common
sense, utilizes another vast source of user-generated
information folksonomy.
4. Common Sense And Folksonomy
The simplicity of the OMCS project and the freely
available tool kit for common sense reasoning in the
form of ConceptNet provide ample opportunity to
anyone aiming to use textual processing in their
applications.
On the other hand, community based content is
another vast source of information. The tags of
folksonomy are already being utilized for the purpose
of search and organization. We believe that in
combining these two sources of arrangement and
inference, a powerful mix can be developed for an
efficient search system for Web2.0.
Also, the source of OMCS projects common
sense information and that of tags in folksonomy is the
same. Users of the World Wide Web have contributed
to both knowledge bases. We believe it would be very
beneficial to apply the common sense information
present in OMCS through the ConceptNet tool kit for
addressing the problem of searching through
folksonomy.
4.1. Central Problems of Folksonomy
The central problems in folksonomy are two:
1) Lack of contextual information and
2) Limited inference capabilities due to its loose
ontology
We propose a framework in which both these
issues are addressed through the application of
common sense ontology. Figure 2 summarises this
mapping.
User
Generated by
User Common Sense
Common Sense Ontology
Mapped by
Machine Common Sense
Folksonomy
User Common Sense
description
Content
Figure 2 Architecture of Proposed Framework
4.2. Flow of Control
An outline for using common sense on
folksonomy is proposed below.
a) The user enters a search keyword and is
presented with search options. These would decide the
generality or specification of the concept association
and the relation-types used for expansion of concepts.
b) ConceptNet tool kit is used for concept
expansion based on users preferences.
c) A search is performed to get a set of result
items for each resulting concept.
d) A score function is applied to the union of
these sets to get a final listing of results.
e) The results are displayed to the user labelled
with the associated concept and the user has the option
of picking one of the expanded concepts for further
search. Figure 3 describes this flow of control in the
proposed solution.
Get User Query
Pick options
Get related concepts
Perform search
User picked
another concept from
matched concepts
Apply score function
Display results
Figure 3 Flow of Control in Proposed Framework
4.3. User Preferences
1) Generality/Specification: Let Conceptual
Similarity (C) of a concept be the closeness of the
concept to the original keyword. This closeness of
concept is decided by the f and i values returned by
ConceptNet. The i values are multiplied by 10 because
they are usually an order of magnitude smaller than
the f values but are still very important.
C ( x ) = f ( x ) + (10 i ( x ) )
The search engines score (S) is the score assigned
by the search service to a specific search result. C and
S are both normalized to lie between 0 and 1 to
accommodate differences in ranking scale of different
search services. Let and be normalized values of C
and S respectively. Then:
C ( x)
( x) =
max( C ( x) )
S ( x)
( x) =
max( S ( x) )
The user enters the required level of generality
(G) of the combined results. A more specific
preference would give more weight to the items
conceptually more similar to the original keyword i.e.
those with higher values. A general preference would
rank those items higher which have high ranking in the
search service i.e. those with higher values. This
preference is implemented through the score function.
2) Relation-types: The user can also specify the
relation-types of ConceptNet for advanced control
over concept expansion. The user may decide to
expand concepts along a limited set of relations for
better targeting of the results. For example, the user
may prefer to search along the IsA relation-type along
with PartOf and not along MotivationOf relation-type.
4.4. Score Function
At the heart of the search results presentation is
the score function. It is a function which assigns a
relative score to each individual result item based on
conceptual similarity and service rank of the item and
on user preferences of generality.
n
score( x ) = inst _ score( xi )
i =1
Where x is an individual item returned by the
search service, xi are instances of the item x returned
as responses to different concepts and n is the total
number of these instances. The summation ensures
that if an item appears as a result of more than one
concepts, it gets a higher score in the final listing.
The score of a single instance of a result item is
given by inst_score. inst_score is a function of ,
and G where and are normalized values of
conceptual similarity and service rank respectively and
G is the level of generality specified by the user.
inst _ score( xi ) = s ( ( x) , ( x), G )
At this point, we leave s undefined so that it may
be tailored according to specific situations. We
provide an example of this in Proof of Concept.
5. Proof of Concept
To demonstrate the practical feasibility of the
framework, a prototype was developed using the photo
sharing service flickr (www.flickr.com) as a case
study. The prototype was implemented using
ConceptNets knowledge base and flickrs API. For
the inst_score function of Equation 2, we used a
simple linear function:
inst _ score( xi ) = (G ( xi ) ) + (1 G ) ( x )
Figures 4 and 5 show the user interface and
ranked results generated by the prototype.
Keyword and
Generality
Relation
Types
Figure 4 User Interface of the Prototype
Expanded Concepts: car(0.03:0.12), vehicle(1:1), automobile(0.24:0), engine(0.41:0), Expanded
four wheel(0.28:0),
Concepts
Ranked
Results
(1)
Figure 5 Concepts and Results in the Prototype
6. Future Work
This paper has outlined a framework for
utilization of machine common sense for addressing
the problem of search in folksonomy. While the
application of this technique is feasible as shown by
the proof of concept, several variables will have to be
adjusted to fit this approach to real life applications.
Two aspects of the framework which could benefit
from a thorough study are the concept expansion
algorithm and the score function.
(2) Concept expansion currently uses the nave
approach of expansion and selection based on the f
value. A more sophisticated concept expansion
algorithm should result in concepts with higher
conceptual similarity to the users query.
Score function currently uses a summation
function for assigning values to items appearing as
results for different concepts. A statistical analysis of
different functions may lead to a better ranking system
for such result items.
Another important open issue in this framework is
the use of a natural language interface as the front-end.
ConceptNet comes with a powerful tool kit for natural
language processing, MontyLingua [21]. Integrating a
natural language front-end with this system may yield
fruitful results.
7. Conclusion
The information overload caused by the coming
of user-created data on Web2.0 can only be addressed
by utilizing all available resources for search and
organization. User created organization of data has
produced acceptable levels of results but still has
problems because of variances in users creating this
organization. A possible solution to this problem is the
application of machine common sense to the problem
of search. In this paper we have outlined a framework
for using the Open Mind Common Sense project to
address the issue. This is done through the use of
ConceptNet, a freely available tool kit for machine
common sense, for search in folksonomy. Practical
feasibility is demonstrated by an application of this
technique on a popular Web2.0 service. An outline for
future work along this path has also been given.
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