Addressing Label Sparsity With Class-Level Common Sense for Google Maps

Successful knowledge graphs (KGs) solved the historical knowledge acquisition bottleneck by supplanting the previous expert focus with a simple, crowd-friendly one: KG nodes represent popular people, places, organizations, etc., and the graph arcs represent common sense relations like affiliations, locations, etc. Techniques for more general, categorical, KG curation do not seem to have made the same transition: the KG research community is still largely focused on logic-based methods that belie the common-sense characteristics of successful KGs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet novel three-tier crowd approach to acquiring class-level attributes that represent broad common sense associations between categories, and can be used with the classic knowledge-base default & override technique, to address the early label sparsity problem faced by machine learning systems for problems that lack data for training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our acquisition and reasoning approach on a pair of very real industrial-scale problems: how to augment an existing KG of places and offerings (e.g. stores and products, restaurants and dishes) with associations between them indicating the availability of the offerings at those places. Label sparsity is a general problem, and not specific to these use cases, that prevents modern AI and machine learning techniques from applying to many applications for which labeled data is not readily available. As a result, the study of how to acquire the knowledge and data needed for AI to work is as much a problem today as it was in the 1970s and 80s during the advent of expert systems. Our approach was a critical part of enabling a worldwide local search capability on Google Maps, with which users can find products and dishes that are available in most places on earth.