In artificial intelligence (AI), commonsense reasoning is a human-like ability to make

presumptions about the type and essence of ordinary situations humans encounter every day. These
assumptions include judgments about the nature of physical objects, taxonomic properties, and
peoples' intentions. A device that exhibits commonsense reasoning might be capable of drawing
conclusions that are similar to humans' folk psychology (humans' innate ability to reason about
people's behavior and intentions) and naive physics (humans' natural understanding of the physical
world).[1]

Definitions and characterizations

Some definitions and characterizations of common sense from different authors include:
 "Commonsense knowledge includes the basic facts about events (including actions) and
their effects, facts about knowledge and how it is obtained, facts about beliefs and desires. It
also includes the basic facts about material objects and their properties."[2]
 "Commonsense knowledge differs from encyclopedic knowledge in that it deals with
general knowledge rather than the details of specific entities."[3]
 Commonsense knowledge is "real world knowledge that can provide a basis for additional
knowledge to be gathered and interpreted automatically".[4]
 The commonsense world consists of "time, space, physical interactions, people, and so on".
[1]
 Common sense is "all the knowledge about the world that we take for granted but rarely
state out loud".[5]
 Common sense is "broadly reusable background knowledge that's not specific to a particular
subject area... knowledge that you ought to have."[6]
NYU professor Ernest Davis characterizes commonsense knowledge as "what a typical seven year
old knows about the world", including physical objects, substances, plants, animals, and human
society. It usually excludes book-learning, specialized knowledge, and knowledge of conventions;
but it sometimes includes knowledge about those topics. For example, knowing how to play cards is
specialized knowledge, not "commonsense knowledge"; but knowing that people play cards for fun
does count as "commonsense knowledge".[7]

Commonsense reasoning problem

A self-driving car system may use a neural network to determine which parts of the picture seem to
match previous training images of pedestrians, and then model those areas as slow-moving but
somewhat unpredictable rectangular prisms that must be avoided.
Compared with humans, existing AI lacks several features of human commonsense reasoning; most
notably, humans have powerful mechanisms for reasoning about "naïve physics" such as space,
time, and physical interactions. This enables even young children to easily make inferences like "If
I roll this pen off a table, it will fall on the floor". Humans also have a powerful mechanism of "folk
psychology" that helps them to interpret natural-language sentences such as "The city councilmen
refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence". (A generic AI has difficulty
discerning whether the ones alleged to be advocating violence are the councilmen or the
demonstrators.)[1][8][9] This lack of "common knowledge" means that AI often makes different
mistakes than humans make, in ways that can seem incomprehensible. For example, existing self-
driving cars cannot reason about the location nor the intentions of pedestrians in the exact way that
humans do, and instead must use non-human modes of reasoning to avoid accidents.[10][11][12]
Overlapping subtopics of commonsense reasoning include quantities and measurements, time and
space, physics, minds, society, plans and goals, and actions and change.[13]

Commonsense knowledge problem

Main article: Commonsense knowledge (artificial intelligence)
The commonsense knowledge problem is a current project in the sphere of artificial intelligence to
create a database that contains the general knowledge most individuals are expected to have,
represented in an accessible way to artificial intelligence programs[14] that use natural language.
Due to the broad scope of the commonsense knowledge, this issue is considered to be among the
most difficult problems in AI research.[15] In order for any task to be done as a human mind would
manage it, the machine is required to appear as intelligent as a human being. Such tasks include
object recognition, machine translation and text mining. To perform them, the machine has to be
aware of the same concepts that an individual, who possess commonsense knowledge, recognizes.

Commonsense in intelligent tasks

In 1961, Bar Hillel first discussed the need and significance of practical knowledge for natural
language processing in the context of machine translation.[16] Some ambiguities are resolved by
using simple and easy to acquire rules. Others require a broad acknowledgement of the surrounding
world, thus they require more commonsense knowledge. For instance, when a machine is used to
translate a text, problems of ambiguity arise, which could be easily resolved by attaining a concrete
and true understanding of the context. Online translators often resolve ambiguities using analogous
or similar words. For example, in translating the sentences "The electrician is working" and "The
telephone is working" into German, the machine translates correctly "working" in the means of
"laboring" in the first one and as "functioning properly" in the second one. The machine has seen
and read in the body of texts that the German words for "laboring" and "electrician" are frequently
used in a combination and are found close together. The same applies for "telephone" and "function
properly". However, the statistical proxy which works in simple cases often fails in complex ones.
Existing computer programs carry out simple language tasks by manipulating short phrases or
separate words, but they don't attempt any deeper understanding and focus on short-term results.

Computer vision
Issues of this kind arise in computer vision.[1][17] For instance when looking at a photograph of a
bathroom some items that are small and only partly seen, such as facecloths and bottles, are
recognizable due to the surrounding objects (toilet, wash basin, bathtub), which suggest the purpose
of the room. In an isolated image they would be difficult to identify. Movies prove to be even more
difficult tasks. Some movies contain scenes and moments that cannot be understood by simply
matching memorized templates to images. For instance, to understand the context of the movie, the
viewer is required to make inferences about characters’ intentions and make presumptions
depending on their behavior. In the contemporary state of the art, it is impossible to build and
manage a program that will perform such tasks as reasoning, i.e. predicting characters’ actions. The
most that can be done is to identify basic actions and track characters.