MindNet is knowledge representation project that uses our broad-coverage parser to build semantic networks from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and free text. MindNets are produced by a fully automatic process that takes the input text, sentence-breaks it, parses each sentence to build a semantic dependency graph (Logical Form), aggregates these individual graphs into a single large graph, and then assigns probabilistic weights to subgraphs based on their frequency in the corpus as a whole. The project also encompasses a number of mechanisms for searching, sorting, and measuring the similarity of paths in a MindNet. We believe that automatic procedures such as MindNets provide the only credible prospect for acquiring world knowledge on the scale needed to support common-sense reasoning.

Recent work on MN has focused on enabling the storage of multilingual knowledge in support of our Machine Translation project.

MindNet Browsing Now Available! If you are interested in more detailed information about MindNets, a small number of sample MindNets have been made available for online browsing at the mnex project homepage.

• Bill Dolan
• Steve Richardson
• Lucy Vanderwende
• Arul Menezes
• Hisami Suzuki
• Gary Kacmarcik

• L.Vanderwende, G.Kacmarcik, H.Suzuki and A.Menezes, 2005. MindNet: An Automatically-Created Lexical Resource In Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP 2005 Interactive Demonstrations, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, October 2005.
• H.Suzuki, G.Kacmarcik, L.Vanderwende and A.Menezes, 2005. Mindnet/mnex:意味関係データベースの自動構築と解析のためのツール (Mindnet and mnex: An Environment for Exploring Semantic Space), In 言語処理学会第11回全国大会論文集 (Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Society of Natural Language Processing), Takamatsu, Japan, 2005. (in Japanese)
• Dolan, William, Lucy Vanderwende, and Stephen Richardson. 2000. Polysemy in a Broad-Coverage Natural Language Processing System. In Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches. Ravin, Y. and Leacock, C., eds., Oxford University Press.
• Richardson, Stephen D., Dolan, William B., and Vanderwende, Lucy 1998. MindNet: acquiring and structuring semantic information from text. In Proceedings of COLING '98.
• Richardson, S. 1997. Determining Similarity and Inferring Relations in a Lexical Knowledge Base. Ph.D. thesis, The City University of New York, 187 pages.
• Dolan, W. 1995. Metaphor as an Emergent Property of Machine-Readable Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium Series, to appear.
• Vanderwende, L. 1995. Ambiguity in the acquisition of lexical information. In Proceedings of the AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium Series, working notes of the symposium on representation and acquisition of lexical knowledge, pp. 174-179.
• Vanderwende, L. 1995. The Analysis of Noun Sequences using Semantic Information Extracted from On-Line Dictionaries. Ph.D. thesis , Georgetown University, 312 pages.
• Dolan, William B. 1994. Exploiting Lexical Information for Visual Processing. In Proceedings of AAI-94 Workshop on the Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Seattle, Washington, pp. 185-188.
• Dolan, W. 1994. Word Sense Ambiguation: clustering related senses. In Proceedings of COLING94, pp. 712-716.
• Vanderwende, L. 1994. Algorithm for automatic interpretation of noun sequences. In Proceedings of COLING94, pp. 782-788.
• Dolan, William B., L. Vanderwende, and S. Richardson. 1993. Automatically Deriving Structured Knowledge Base from On-line Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, April 21-24, 1993, Vancouver, British Columbia.