P R O J E C T
Bringing Cultural Context to Artificial Intelligence
As the storytelling species, human beings transmit knowledge to succeeding generations through stories. A familiar example of this is through the sharing of traditional recipes handed down from generation to generation. These recipes are often accompanied by mythical stories that in many cultures served to preserve important knowledge about the cultivation, harvest and preparation of traditional and indigenous ingredients. By using the key elements (ingredients, method, story) we built the foundations of an Indigenous Knowledge Graph (IKG) using food wisdom from Timor-Leste and Native American culture, personally shared by the IKG team. Our aim was to show how creating structure around our stories can foster reasoning and cultural intelligence in machines and conversational AIs.
The Indigenous Knowledge Graph is an important foundational step towards building more culturally-aware intelligent agents, not only because it gives intelligent agents a broader view of the world, but also because it is a step towards structuring cultural data. The demo graph was also realised through the voice of Sina, IVOW's conversational AI.
As the storytelling species, human beings transmit knowledge to succeeding generations through stories. A familiar example of this is through the sharing of traditional recipes handed down from generation to generation. These recipes are often accompanied by mythical stories that in many cultures served to preserve important knowledge about the cultivation, harvest and preparation of traditional and indigenous ingredients. By using the key elements (ingredients, method, story) we built the foundations of an Indigenous Knowledge Graph (IKG) using food wisdom from Timor-Leste and Native American culture, personally shared by the IKG team. Our aim was to show how creating structure around our stories can foster reasoning and cultural intelligence in machines and conversational AIs.
The Indigenous Knowledge Graph is an important foundational step towards building more culturally-aware intelligent agents, not only because it gives intelligent agents a broader view of the world, but also because it is a step towards structuring cultural data. The demo graph was also realised through the voice of Sina, IVOW's conversational AI.
Click to enlarge
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Indigenous Knowledge Graph | Neo4j
In our demo, we include the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are most relevant to each culture and recipe, and these end up acting as an ontology -- a way to sort information into logical hierarchical relationships. Pictured is the IKG created by Wolfgang Victor Yarlott using Neo4j (a graph database platform) which shows the relationship between the SDGs, recipes and ingredients, as well as the corresponding connections between cultural origins and traditional narrative. Combined as a whole these elements are what make up each story. |
RESULTS
Read the interactive whitepaper on this project on Issuu or download your own PDF:
Presented as part of the 2020 progam