A graph-based approach to commonsense concept extraction and semantic similarity detection

Commonsense knowledge representation and reasoning support a wide variety of potential applications in fields such as document auto-categorization, Web search enhancement, topic gisting, social process modeling, and concept-level opinion and sentiment analysis. Solutions to these problems, however, demand robust knowledge bases capable of supporting flexible, nuanced reasoning. Populating such knowledge bases is highly time-consuming, making it necessary to develop techniques for deconstructing natural language texts into commonsense concepts. In this work, we propose an approach for effective multi-word commonsense expression extraction from unrestricted English text, in addition to a semantic similarity detection technique allowing additional matches to be found for specific concepts not already present in knowledge bases.