PurposeNet: A Knowledge Base Organized around Purpose

We show how purpose can be used as a central guiding principle for organizing knowledge about artifacts. It allows the actions in which the artifact participates to be related naturally to other objects. Similarly, the structure or parts of the artifact can also be related to the actions. A knowledgebase called PurposeNet has been built using these principles. A comparison with other knowledebases shows that it is a superior method in terms of coverage. It also makes it possible for automatic extraction of simple facts (or information) from text for populating a richly structured knowledgebase. An experiment in domain-specific question-answering from a given passage shows that PurposeNet used alongwith scripts (or knowledge of stereotypical situations), can lead to substantially higher accuracy in question answering. In the domain of car racing, individually they produce correct answers to 50% and 37.5% questions respectively, but together they produce 89% correct answers.