Conversational Computation

Current Human Computation systems suffer from substantial limitations on the complexity of the operations they can perform; although these limitations can be mitigated by careful workflow design, those workflows can, in turn, limit task heterogeneity. Some limitations are due to the underlying software platform, but others are due to a lack of flexibility and communication ability on the part of the non-human component of the HC system. In short, the software component is often not intelligent enough to communicate its needs effectively to the human component, and it is not intelligent enough to understand the humans’ attempts to satisfy those needs. Curious Cat is an AI system, built on top of the Cyc platform (Lenat, Commun ACM 38:32, 1995; Panton et al., Common sense reasoning—from Cyc to intelligent assistant. In: Cai Y, Abascal J (eds) Ambient intelligence in everyday life. LNAI 3864. Springer, pp 1–31, 2006), whose conversational interactions crowdsource information about the world for the purpose of providing highly specific assistance and recommendations. In this chapter, we describe the general goal of specific assistance, outline the features of the Cyc platform that render it suitable for pursuing this goal, and illustrate by an example both how conversational knowledge capture from humans is achieved, and how the resulting knowledge is used to support assistance.