Solving Winograd Schema Challenge: using semantic parsing, automatic knowledge acquisition and logical reasoning

Turing test has been a benchmark scale for measuring the human level intelligence in computers since it was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. However, for last 60 years, the applications such as ELIZA, PARRY, Cleverbot and Eugene Goostman, that claimed to pass the test. These applications are either based on tricks to fool humans on a textual chat based test or there has been a disagreement between AI communities on them passing the test. This has led to the school of thought that it might not be the ideal test for predicting the human level intelligence in machines.

Consequently, the Winograd Schema Challenge has been suggested as an alternative to the Turing test. As opposed to deciding the intelligent behavior with the help of chat servers, like it was done in the Turing test, the Winograd Schema Challenge is a question answering test. It consists of sentence and question pairs such that the answer to the question depends on the resolution of a definite pronoun or adjective in the sentence. The answers are fairly intuitive for humans but they are difficult for machines because it requires some sort of background or commonsense knowledge about the sentence.

In this thesis, I propose a novel technique to solve the Winograd Schema Challenge. The technique has three basic modules at its disposal, namely, a Semantic Parser that parses the English text (both sentences and questions) into a formal representation, an Automatic Background Knowledge Extractor that extracts the Background Knowledge pertaining to the given Winograd sentence, and an Answer Set Programming Reasoning Engine that reasons on the given Winograd sentence and the corresponding Background Knowledge. The applicability of the technique is illustrated by solving a subset of Winograd Schema Challenge pertaining to a certain type of Background Knowledge. The technique is evaluated on the subset and a notable accuracy is achieved.