Curious Cat--Mobile, Context-Aware Conversational Crowdsourcing Knowledge Acquisition

Scaled acquisition of high-quality structured knowledge has been a longstanding goal of Artificial Intelligence research. Recent advances in crowdsourcing, the sheer number of Internet and mobile users, and the commercial availability of supporting platforms offer new tools for knowledge acquisition. This article applies context-aware knowledge acquisition that simultaneously satisfies users’ immediate information needs while extending its own knowledge using crowdsourcing. The focus is on knowledge acquisition on a mobile device, which makes the approach practical and scalable; in this context, we propose and implement a new KA approach that exploits an existing knowledge base to drive the KA process, communicate with the right people, and check for consistency of the user-provided answers. We tested the viability of the approach in experiments using our platform with real users around the world, and an existing large source of common-sense background knowledge. These experiments show that the approach is promising: the knowledge is estimated to be true and useful for users 95% of the time. Using context to proactively drive knowledge acquisition increased engagement and effectiveness (the number of new assertions/day/user increased for 175%). Using pre-existing and newly acquired knowledge also proved beneficial.