EventNet: Inferring temporal relations between commonsense events

Abstract

In this paper, we describe EventNet, a toolkit for inferring temporal relations between Commonsense events. It comprises 10,000 nodes and 30,000 temporal links mined from the Openmind Commonsense Knowledge Base. It enables applications to deduce "obvious" (to people) temporal relations between commonly occurring events, for example: First, you wake up, then you can leave the house in the morning. The temporal relation might be one of cause and effect, of action/goal or prerequisite relations, or simply that they tend to follow each other in a commonly occurring "script". In addition, the algorithm has some built-in heuristics to infer when its information is not enough. It then finds semantically similar nodes to dynamically search the knowledge base. BventNet has been used in projects such as an intelligent kitchen, and in intelligent interfaces for consumer electronics devices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.