Sang Ha Nam , In Cheol Kim

KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 10, pp. 397-406, Oct. 2014
10.3745/KTSDE.2014.3.10.397,   PDF Download:

Abstract

In order to answer the questions successfully on behalf of the human in Deep QA environments such as Jeopardy! of the American quiz show, the computer is required to have the capability of fast temporal and spatial reasoning on a large-scale commonsense knowledge base. In this paper, we present a scalable spatial reasoning algorithm for deriving efficiently new directional and topological relations using the MapReduce framework, one of well-known parallel distributed computing environments. The proposed reasoning algorithm assumes as input a large-scale spatial knowledge base including CSD-9 directional relations and RCC-8 topological relations. To infer new directional and topological relations from the given spatial knowledge base, it performs the cross-consistency checks as well as the path-consistency checks on the knowledge base. To maximize the parallelism of reasoning computations according to the principle of the MapReduce framework, we design the algorithm to partition effectively the large knowledge base into smaller ones and distribute them over multiple computing nodes at the map phase. And then, at the reduce phase, the algorithm infers the new knowledge from distributed spatial knowledge bases. Through experiments performed on the sample knowledge base with the MapReduce-based implementation of our algorithm, we proved the high performance of our large-scale spatial reasoner.

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