Acquiring Naturalistic Concept Descriptions from the Web

Many of the beliefs that one uses to reason about everyday entities and events are neither strictly true or even logically consistent. Rather, people appear to rely on a large body of folk knowledge in the form of stereotypical associations, clichés and other kinds of naturalistic descriptions, many of which express views of the world that are second-hand, overly-simplified and, in some cases, non-literal to the point of being poetic. These descriptions pervade our language yet one rarely finds them in authoritative linguistic resources like dictionaries and encyclopaedias. We describe here how such naturalistic descriptions can be harvested from the web in the guise of explicit similes and related text patterns, and empirically demonstrate that these descriptions do broadly capture the way people see the world, at least from the perspective of category organization in an ontology.