ConceptNet continues to improve natural language understanding in latest update

Luminoso, the company that turns unstructured text data into business-critical insights, is introducing new features to ConceptNet, an open data semantic network.

“We’ve seen that ConceptNet is a crucial ingredient in allowing computers to understand what words mean to people, robustly, in many languages,” said Robyn Speer, Luminoso’s chief science officer. “The changes in this version are largely about making it easier to maintain ConceptNet, and that’s important so that ConceptNet can continue being a foundation for natural language understanding.”

ConceptNet 5.8 features:

• Continuous deployment: ConceptNet is now set up with continuous integration using Jenkins and deployment using AWS Terraform, which will make it faster to deploy new versions of the semantic network and easier for others to set up mirrors of the API.
• Additional curation of crowd-sourced data: ConceptNet’s developers have filtered entries from Wiktionary that were introducing hateful terminology to ConceptNet without its context. This is part of their ongoing effort to prevent human biases and prejudices from being built into language models. ConceptNet 5.8 has also updated its Wiktionary parser so that it can handle updated versions of the French and German-language Wiktionary projects.
• HTTPS support: Developers can now reach ConceptNet’s website and API over HTTPS, improving data transfer security for applications using ConceptNet.

ConceptNet originated from MIT Media Lab’s Open Mind Common Sense project more than two decades ago, and the semantic network is now used in AI applications around the world.

ConceptNet is cited in more than 700 AI papers in Google Scholar, and its API is queried over 500,000 times per day from more than 1,000 unique IPs.

For more information about this release, visit http://conceptnet.io/.