MAS 960 CommonSense Reasoning Class project

ConSearch:An Concept-Associating Search Interface using Commonsense

Jackie Lee and Henry Lieberman
Last updated on December 15, 2006

ConSearch is a concept-associating search interface based on a cognitive model of web searching. It's a rating system that preserves the relevance of modern statisitcal learning and adds commonsense reasoning to make the search result reasonable. Web search usually isn't a good experience when possible results are totally un-searchable. People consumed heavy mental loads of filtering out irrelevant web links. To make the search experience easier, the search mechanism should be mapped into our mental model. Human cognition has a great advantage over machines on recognizing things that make sense. Adding a layer of conceptual relationship could help users easily figure out the right ways to go. ConSearch provides an interactive way of retrieving search results by associating concepts.

INTERACTIVE SEARCH BY ASSOCIATING CONCEPTS
The hard time in web searches is usually filtering out irrelevant results if the right answers weren't so clear to find. Users are suffered heavy mental load in switching web pages back and forward. Grouping search results by similar concept and retrieving them in a concept-associated manner can possibly offload some irrelevant searching tasks.

We suggests an interactive way of filtering results. A user enters some keywords and then the system will return grouped results conceptually related to the keywords. It's relatively easier for users to identify a concept if it's within his or her goal. Web links was treated as nodes. We utilized ConceptNet to find out the most relevant topic among a group of web links. The relevant topics come from a spreading activation within a semantic network.
We consider all known concepts represented as nodes connected in a network. Each node is extended by reasoning the context information from ConceptNet. A concept is directly connected by links to its most-closely-related concepts. When a concept receives an activation signal from one of its neighbors, it in turn passes along the activation signal to each of its other neighbors. This is referred to as spreading activation. The concept-associate search also encourages users to follow the reasonable path of search. Once a user finds out an appropriate concept s/he needs. The search scope will also be narrowed down to related concepts.


Lee, C.H., Lieberman, H. ConSearch:An Concept-Associating Search Interface using Commonsense. Class paper (full-text)



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