Halo I: A Controlled Experiment for Large Scale Knowledge Base Development

Abstract

Project Halo is a multi-staged effort, sponsored by Vulcan Inc, aimed at creating the Digital Aristotle (DA), an application that will encompass much of the world’s scientific knowledge and be capable of applying sophisticated problem solving to answer novel questions. Vulcan envisions two primary roles for the Digital Aristotle: as a tutor to instruct students in the sciences, and as an interdisciplinary research assistant to help scientists in their work. As a first step towards this goal, there was a six-month Pilot phase, designed to assess the state of the art in applied Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R). Vulcan selected three teams, each of which was to formally represent 70 pages from the Advanced Placement (AP) chemistry syllabus and deliver knowledge based systems capable of answering questions on that syllabus. The evaluation quantified each system’s coverage of the syllabus in terms of its ability to answer novel, previously unseen questions and to provide human-readable answer justifications. These justifications will play a critical role in building user trust in the question-answering capabilities of the Digital Aristotle.Despite differences in approach, all three systems did very well on the challenge, achieving performance comparable to the human median. The analysis also provided key insights into how the approaches might be scaled, while at the same time suggesting how the cost of producing such systems might be reduced.

Full support for this research was provided by Vulcan Inc. as part of Project Halo.