AURA: Enabling Subject Matter Experts to Construct Declarative Knowledge Bases from Science Textbooks

The long-term goal of Project Halo is to build an application called Digital Aristotle that can answer questions on a variety of science topics and provide user and domain appropriate explanations. As a near-term goal, we are focusing on enabling Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to construct declarative knowledge bases (KBs) from 50 pages of a science textbook in the domains of Physics (Giancoli 2004), Chemistry (Brown et al. 2003) and Biology (Campbell et al. 2001) in a way that the system can answer questions similar to those on an Advanced Placement (AP) exam. We will demonstrate the current state of a system called AURA that we have been developing as a contributing technology toward the goal of Digital Aristotle. The innovative features of AURA are that it supports knowledge formulation for a mixture of textual and nontextual knowledge, and question formulation using an interactive dialog based on simplified English. The nontextual knowledge may contain tables, chemical reactions, a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Ken Barker, Vinay K. Chaudhri, Shaw Yi Chaw, Peter Clark, Daniel Hansch, Bonnie E. John, Sunil Mishra, John Pacheco, Bruce W. Porter, Aaron Spaulding, Moritz Weiten
• Keywords: AAAI 2007, Digital Aristotle, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Formulation, Nontextual Knowledge