2005, The Aesthetiscope: Visualizing Aesthetic Readings of Text (2008)
The traditional story understanding dogma in AI holds that there exists a singular, objective meaning implied by text, which can be uncovered by applying just the right logical inferences. But...
Self-reflexive performance: Dancing with the computed audience of culture (2008)
Abstract Keywords Typically performance is a display for others, and is time-limited. But if we also regard everyday life as a performance, we see that it is a continuous improvisation—a...
Abstract Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks (2008)
Hugo Liu, Pattie Maes, Glorianna Davenport
Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness—the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles...
NLP (Natural Language Processing) for NLP (Natural Language Programming) (2008)
Rada Mihalcea, Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman
Abstract. Natural Language Processing holds great promise for making computer interfaces that are easier to use for people, since people will (hopefully) be able to talk to the computer in their own...
Men and women have unique sensibilities for information, which can be tapped to create gender-sensitive user interfaces that appeal more specifically to each sex. Building on previous research in...
Submitted to BT Technology Journal Teaching Machines about Everyday Life (2007)
Push Singh, Barbara Barry, Hugo Liu
In order to build a new breed of software that can deeply understand people and our problems, so that they can help us to solve them, we are developing at the Media Lab a suite of computational tools...
Programmatic semantics for natural language interfaces (2005)
An important way of making interfaces usable by nonexpert users is to enable the use of natural language input, as in natural language query interfaces to databases, or MUDs and MOOs. When the...
Metafor: Visualizing stories as code (2005)
Every program tells a story. Programming, then, is the art of constructing a story about the objects in the program and what they do in various situations. So-called programming languages, while easy...
What is an artwork and how could a machine become artist? This paper addresses the provocative question by theorizing a computational model of aesthetics and implementing the Aesthetiscope—a...
Teaching Machines about Everyday Life (2004)
Push Singh, Barbara Barry, Hugo Liu
In order to build a new breed of software that can deeply understand people and our problems, so that they can help us to solve them, we are developing at the Media Lab a suite of computational tools...
ConceptNet: A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit Hugo Liu and Push Singh (2004)
Media Laboratory Massachusetts, Hugo Liu, Push Singh
ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents including...
ConceptNet: A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit (2004)
We describe ConceptNet, a freely available semantic network presently consisting of over 250,000 elements of commonsense knowledge. Inspired by Cyc, ConceptNet includes a wide range of commonsense...
What Would They Think? A Computational Model of Attitudes (2004)
A key to improving at any task is frequent feedback from people whose opinions we care about: our family, friends, mentors, and the experts. However, such input is not usually available from the...
Beating common sense into interactive applications (2004)
Henry Lieberman, Hugo Liu, Push Singh, Barbara Barry
■ A long-standing dream of artificial intelligence has been to put commonsense knowledge into computers—enabling machines to reason about everyday life. Some projects, such as Cyc, have begun to...
Commonsense reasoning in and over natural language (2004)
Abstract. ConceptNet is a very large semantic network of commonsense knowledge suitable for making various kinds of practical inferences over text. ConceptNet captures a wide range of commonsense...
Toward a Programmatic Semantics of Natural Language (2004)
Natural language is imbued with a rich semantics but unfortunately its complex elegance is often mistaken for mere imprecision. Because complete parsers of English are not yet achievable, people...
What Would They Think? A Computational Model of Attitudes (2004)
A key to improving at any task is frequent feedback from people whose opinions we care about: our family, friends, mentors, and the experts. However, such input is not usually available from the...
What Would They Think? A Computational Model of Attitudes (2004)
Understanding the personalities and dynamics of an online community empowers the community’s potential and existing members. This task has typically required a considerable investment of a user’s...
A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge (2003)
Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker
This paper presents a novel way for assessing the affective qualities of natural language and a scenario for its use. Previous approaches to textual affect sensing have employed keyword spotting,...
Visualizing the Affective Structure of a Text Document (2003)
Hugo Liu, Ted Selker, Henry Lieberman
This paper introduces an approach for graphically visualizing the affective structure of a text document. A document is first affectively analyzed using a unique textual affect sensing engine, which...
A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge (2003)
Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker
This paper presents a novel way for assessing the affective qualities of natural language and a scenario for its use. Previous approaches to textual affect sensing have employed keyword spotting,...
A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge (2003)
This paper presents a novel way for assessing the affective qualities of natural language and a scenario for its use. Previous approaches to textual affect sensing have employed keyword spotting,...
Unpacking meaning from words: A context-centered approach to computational lexicon design (2003)
Abstract. The knowledge representation tradition in computational lexicon design represents words as static encapsulations of purely lexical knowledge. We suggest that this view poses certain...
Robust photo retrieval using world semantics (2002)
Photos annotated with textual keywords can be thought of as resembling documents, and querying for photos by keywords is akin to the information retrieval done by search engines. A common approach to...
Adaptive Linking between Text and Photos Using Common Sense Reasoning (2002)
Abstract. In a hypermedia authoring task, an author often wants to set up meaningful connections between different media, such as text and photographs. To facilitate this task, it is helpful to have...
GOOSE: A Goal-Oriented Search Engine With Commonsense (2002)
Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker
Abstract. A novice search engine user may find searching the web for information difficult and frustrating because she may naturally express search goals rather than the topic keywords search engines...
Automatic Affective Feedback in an Email Browser (2002)
This paper demonstrates a new approach to recognizing and presenting the affect of text. The approach starts with a corpus of 400,000 responses to questions about everyday life in Open Mind Common...
GOOSE: A Goal-Oriented Search Engine with Commonsense (2002)
Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker
A novice search engine user may find searching the web for information difficult and frustrating because she may naturally express search goals rather than the topic keywords search engines need. In...
Robust photo retrieval using world semantics (2002)
Photos annotated with textual keywords can be thought of as resembling documents, and querying for photos by keywords is akin to the information retrieval done by search engines. A common approach to...
GOOSE: A Goal-Oriented Search Engine With Commonsense (2002)
Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker
Abstract. A novice search engine user may find searching the web for information difficult and frustrating because she may naturally express search goals rather than the topic keywords search engines...
Adaptive Linking between Text and Photos Using Common Sense Reasoning (2002)
Abstract. In a hypermedia authoring task, an author often wants to set up meaningful connections between different media, such as text and photographs. To facilitate this task, it is helpful to have...