Large Language Models as a Tool for Mining Object Knowledge

Abstract: Commonsense knowledge is essential for machines to reason about the world. LLMs have demonstrated their ability to perform almost human-like text generation. Despite this success, they fall short as trustworthy intelligent systems, due to the opacity of the basis for their answers and a tendency to confabulate facts when questioned about obscure entities or technical domains. We hypothesize, however, that their general knowledge about objects in the everyday world is largely sound. Based on that hypothesis, this paper investigates LLMs' ability to formulate explicit knowledge about common physical artifacts, focusing on their parts and materials. Our work distinguishes between the substances that comprise an entire object and those that constitute its parts$\unicode{x2014}$a previously underexplored distinction in knowledge base construction. Using few-shot with five in-context examples and zero-shot multi-step prompting, we produce a repository of data on the parts and materials of about 2,300 objects and their subtypes. Our evaluation demonstrates LLMs' coverage and soundness in extracting knowledge. This contribution to knowledge mining should prove useful to AI research on reasoning about object structure and composition and serve as an explicit knowledge source (analogous to knowledge graphs) for LLMs performing multi-hop question answering.