ConceptNetDaily Twitter Bot

I’ve just launched my second Twitter bot – @ConceptNetDaily takes a random concept from the A.I. site ConceptNet and posts it to Twitter with a link back to the site. A tweet looks like:

“When humans own horses, humans groom and ride horses.” http://tinyurl.com/ydvf7vg

The TinyURL expands out to an address like: http://openmind.media.mit.edu/en/assertion/143313/

The aim of the site is to build a large repository of common-sense knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge that humans take for granted and never write down as statements for a computer to understand.  Currently it tracks over 1,026,553 statements.

Using the link you can vote on the concept.  Vote up if the concept is solid (i.e. something a human would say is ‘right’) or down if it is wrong, silly or erroneous.  The site supports OpenID which makes starting a touch easier.

My goal with this bot is to remind people every day to vote on the concepts and to add new knowledge.  If a concept has many votes then we can have faith that it is ‘common-sense knowledge’.  If a concept is voted down enough then we can have faith that it is ‘unhelpful or wrong’.

You’ll find a searchable list of Concepts and some random examples on the English homepage.  For good examples see all the information that ConceptNet knows about humans, chess and girls.

Details:

I’ve written the bot in Python using PyYAML, Python-tinyurl and Python-twitter.  It runs every day via a cron job.  It works by guessing a random id for a raw_assertion and checking to see if a concept lives at the URL.  See this XML example for id 143313, I extract the .yaml version via PyYAML but the .xml version renders nicely in your browser if you want a peek.

ConceptNet’s web API is well documented.  ConceptNet itself is written in Python using Django but I’m not using the downloaded version here, just the web API.

My first Twitter bot – @BrightonJobDoom:

Just in case you live here in Brighton you might want to track @BrightonJobDoom to see how healthy (or…not) the job market is in the UK during this rather wobbly recession 🙂  I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 5k coding competition.


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.