<i>At the moment NELL thinks that the First Amendment is a musical instrument, the Second Amendment is a 'hobby,' and is completely unwilling to admit to any knowledge of the fifth amendment at all.</i><p>You can insert your own joke here— but I actually think those are some fascinating insights about the internet.
I'm glad stuff like this is being worked on.<p>But the fact is, it won't <i>really</i> work until we have strong AI. The more I learn about it, the more I'm convinced that nothing except human-level intelligence can properly parse satire, irony, metaphor and simile.<p>Natural language is just too contextual. Sentence parsing and vocabulary identification/disambiguation are really hard problems, but even if we solved them entirely we still wouldn't be able to make sense out of a plain-text corpus.<p>That said, I think NLP research is one of the most promising <i>routes</i> to discovering how to build a strong AI.
Tom Mitchell is on a roll. He also got press for the fMRI mind reader: <a href="http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/24/devices-that-read-peoples-minds-are-you-thinking-what-im-thinking/" rel="nofollow">http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/24/devices-that-read-peopl...</a>
It's about time. I wondered why no one had hooked up a learning AI to Wikipedia/dbpedia and the rest of the Internet. Cyc always semed like a good idea but bad execution to me. Manually feeding in data takes a lot of time and effort. Why not just let something soak up the entire Internet and correct it if it learns the wrong things? Good luck to CMU. Maybe this will become the search engine of the future.
This story would be better titled:
"Computer reads <i>and learns from</i> the Internet"<p>Text-to-voice is already very established. However, "machine learning from the Internet" with its intelligent crawling, parsing, computational linguistics logic, and AI involved is the truly impressive aspect here. Don't you think?
Project homepage: <a href="http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/" rel="nofollow">http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/</a>
No source but you can browse or download the database.<p>NELL even has a twitter feed: <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/cmunell" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/cmunell</a>
Particularly interesting and somewhat comedic is it's complete lack of bias. I'm curious as to how it is absorbing all this data, as the order in which it processes the data could greatly effect how it chooses it's beliefs.
These commenters deserve many internet points:<p><pre><code> Henry T. - so when does NELL become self aware? :-)
Jon M - As soon as it reads this page ;-)</code></pre>