Abstract

Machine common sense (MCS)-the challenge of enabling computers to grasp everyday human knowledge-has been a grand challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) since the 1950s. While recent advances in large language models have led to impressive progress, there is still no consensus on how much common sense today's AI actually possesses. In this brief review, we revisit the historical development of MCS in the context of the Web, examining how the Web's evolution-from early knowledge representation efforts to knowledge graphs, the Semantic Web, and crowdsourcing-has shaped MCS research. We argue that key breakthroughs in Web technologies were instrumental in addressing longstanding challenges of scale and coverage in commonsense reasoning. At the same time, MCS research has influenced the development of core Web applications, including intelligent agents, plausibility-based …

Date

May 8, 2025

Authors

Mayank Kejriwal, Deborah L McGuinness, Henry Lieberman

Source

Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2025

Pages

837-840