Character and document research in the Open Mind Initiative

We describe the Open Mind Initiative, a framework for large scale collaborative efforts in building components of "intelligent" systems that address common sense reasoning, document and language understanding, speech and character recognition, and so on. Based on the Open Source methodology, the Open Mind Initiative allows domain specialists to contribute algorithms, tool developers to provide software infrastructure and tools, and non specialist "e-citizens" to contribute training data and information to large databases. An important challenge is to make it easy and rewarding for e-citizens to provide such information. The paper illustrates the initiative through several demonstration projects of modest scale, including some related to character and document problems, and identifies general challenges and opportunities.