A Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology: How People Think People Think

Commonsense psychology refers to the implicit theories that we all use to make sense of people's behavior in terms of their beliefs, goals, plans, and emotions. These are also the theories we employ when we anthropomorphize complex machines and computers as if they had humanlike mental lives. In order to successfully cooperate and communicate with people, these theories will need to be represented explicitly in future artificial intelligence systems. This book provides a large-scale logical formalization of commonsense psychology in support of humanlike artificial intelligence. It uses formal logic to encode the deep lexical semantics of the full breadth of psychological words and phrases, providing fourteen hundred axioms of first-order logic organized into twenty-nine commonsense psychology theories and sixteen background theories. This in-depth exploration of human commonsense reasoning for artificial intelligence researchers, linguists, and cognitive and social psychologists will serve as a foundation for the development of humanlike artificial intelligence.

Author: Andrew S. Gordon, Jerry R. Hobbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/07/2017
Pages: 584
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.64lbs
Size: 10.42h x 7.35w x 1.38d
ISBN: 9781107151000

About the Author
Gordon, Andrew S.: - Andrew S. Gordon is Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Interactive Narrative Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. His research advances technologies for automatically analyzing and generating narrative interpretations of experiences. A central aim of his research is the large-scale formalization of commonsense knowledge, and reasoning with these formalizations using logical abduction. He is the author of the 2004 book, Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge.Hobbs, Jerry R.: - Jerry R. Hobbs is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Professor at the University of Southern California. He has numerous publications in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, information extraction, and discourse analysis. He was editor of the book Formal Theories of the Commonsense World (1985) and author of Literature and Cognition (1990). He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics and a recipient of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award.