ImageSchemaNet: A Framester Graph for Embodied Commonsense Knowledge

Commonsense knowledge is a broad and challenging area of research which investigates our understanding of the world as well as human assumptions about reality. Deriving directly from the subjective perception of the external world, it is intrinsically intertwined with embodied cognition. Commonsense reasoning is linked to human sense-making, pattern recognition and knowledge framing abilities. This work presents a new resource that formalizes the cognitive theory of image schemas. Image schemas are dynamic conceptual building blocks originating from our sensorimotor interactions with the physical world, and enable our sense-making cognitive activity to assign coherence and structure to entities, events and situations we experience everyday. ImageSchemaNet is an ontology that aligns pre-existing resources, such as FrameNet, VerbNet, WordNet and MetaNet from the Framester hub, to image schema theory. This article describes an empirical application of ImageSchemaNet, combined with semantic parsers, on the task of annotating natural language sentences with image schemas.