Tuan Phong Nguyen with his supervisors Gerhard Weikum (2nd from left) and Simon Razniewski (right). Photo: private
On April, 24 Tuan Phong Nguyen successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Large-Scale Acquisition of Refined Commonsense Knowledge”. Tuan Phong Nguyen joined Saarland University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in January 2021 as a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Prof. Simon Razniewski and Prof. Gerhard Weikum. He was a member of both the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science and the International Max Planck Research School. His doctoral degree was awarded by Saarland University.
The abstract of his Thesis:
Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about properties of concepts and human behaviors (e.g., elephants are big and eat plants, children love visiting zoos, tipping is not a common practice in Japan) is crucial for robust human-centric AI. However, this kind of knowledge is covered by a small number of structured knowledge projects. Most prior CSK resources are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and monolithic strings for P and O. Furthermore, the plausibility of CSK can vary across cul-tures (e.g., "one should tip the waiter" is generally true in the US, but not in Japan), which is overlooked in existing resources. This dissertation aims to address these limitations by:
- introducing advanced commonsense knowledge models with refined subjects, semantic facets, and culture-specific assertions;
- proposing methods for acquiring such knowledge from large-scale web contents and large language models (LLMs).
Our methods strive for both high precision and wide coverage with salient assertions, which resulted in CSK resources that outperform existing resources in various intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations.