Multimodal Knowledge Acquisition and Management

Related information, particularly in the real word, can come in many forms, like text, images, video, and more. Exploiting that information will require a multimodal approach. The Friedland Group, which led Project Moebius at DARPA, is joined by The University of Rochester and Prof. David Forsyth - respective leaders in knowledge acquisition from text and images, to create a new framework for mutlimodal knowledge acquisition and management (MKAM). MKAM utilizes and expands Episodic Logic (EL), a highly expressive logical representation and reasoning framework that has been successfully applied to model complex events and situations. Capturing multimodal knowledge in EL will make it integrable, inference and unification capable. It will also enable the improvement of knowledge acquisition capabilities in individual modalities by providing more context and reducing ambiguities. Our Phase I work will demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through the development of several concrete examples, utilizing data produced by existing knowledge extraction systems, to show how EL can meld knowledge from different modalities while improving acquisition from individual modalities.