Novel methods for energy-based cultural modeling and simulation: Why eight is great in Chinese culture

A key frontier in artificial intelligence systems is the ability to represent and reason about culture, a notoriously difficult notion to define and operationalize. This paper presents a framework for representing, simulating, and reasoning on nuanced cultural worldviews, including culturally-mediated perception and judgment simulation, grounded in the INTELNET nuanced Energy-Based Knowledge Representation (EBKR) and COGVIEW conceptual-psychological formalisms. A detailed example cultural model is provided, covering aspects of Chinese culture relevant to lucky numbers. Simulation output includes information regarding emotions generated, involvement of key cultural notions, areas of agreement and disagreement, and other useful semantic attributes. Goals include the use of cultural worldview networks in reasoning and the simulation of judgments and emotions generated by stimuli in particular cultural contexts. Such frameworks can help simulate the cultural consequences of particular actions or ideas, determining when insults are likely to arise due to impingement on culturally important issues.