Yejin Choi

"So in my lab, we’ve been trying to study how to teach common sense in a more effective way, perhaps by mimicking how when children grow up, they do ask a lot of why-this, why-that questions: The kind of questions that adults wouldn’t ask to each other. It may be obvious to adults, but children while growing up are provided with a lot of such declarative descriptions of common sense.

"It’s reasonable to suspect that humans don’t necessarily try to predict which word comes next, but we rather try to focus on making sense of the world. So we tend to abstract away immediately. 

"You and I, by the way, are not able to remember the discussions, the interactions, the conversation we just had verbatim. We just cannot, because our brain is trained to abstract immediately. But we do remember the gist of our conversation so far, such that if you ask me the same question again, I’ll be surprised. So there’s something about the way that humans learn.

"And also humans learn with curriculum and curiosity. And we make hypotheses about the world. And then if something doesn’t make sense, even children — even babies — they try to do some experiments to figure out their confusion points about simple objects, the physical knowledge about the objects that they interact with. 

"Common sense really is the unspoken rule about how the world works — how the physical world works and how the social world works. So this really influenced the way that we use language, we interpret language. And that’s really one of the key aspects of human intelligence. 

"And the mysterious thing about common sense is that humans acquire it presumably easily. I mean, as in, like, everyone has it, but it’s strikingly hard to write them down to teach machines about these rules that we somehow acquired. So for a long time in AI, common sense was viewed as one of the hardest challenges to overcome. 

"So, we attempted writing down a lot of such common-sense rules and then trained the neural network. And we found that the neural network can really generalize fast out of those examples. So that’s one way to teach neural networks common sense much faster, by providing this collection of declarative knowledge."