Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages

freakshowsam writes "Technology Review has an article on a software engine, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages. TextRunner extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. 'The significance of TextRunner is that it is scalable because it is unsupervised,' says Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, which donated the database of Web pages that TextRunner analyzes. The prototype still has a fairly simple interface and is not meant for public search so much as to demonstrate the automated extraction of information from 500 million Web pages, says Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist leading the project." Try the query "Who has Microsoft acquired?"

Comments

Not entirely helpful

[CRCulver]

I suppose the major problem with this is that it cannot tell the difference between truth and lies or urban legends, it just repeats what other people have said, even if they are conspiracy theorists. The query "Who killed JFK?" suggests the CIA did it.

Re:Not entirely helpful

[owlnation]

I suppose the major problem with this is that it cannot tell the difference between truth and lies or urban legends, it just repeats what other people have said, even if they are conspiracy theorists. The query "Who killed JFK?" suggests the CIA did it.

So much like Wikipedia then?

Nascent AI?

[Drakkenmensch]

I've always viewed intelligence as the ability to take unrelated facts and create new and original ideas from their synthesis. This project may very well lead to new ideas to create the first true AI.

I'll start stockpiling food and armor piercing rounds for the moment Skynet goes live.

500 million web pages can't be wrong

[Dunbal]

Yet strangely, I get a result of:

TextRunner took 9 seconds.
Retrieved 0 results for what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?.

Meh, call me when this stuff can answer the really USEFUL questions in life.

Re:500 million web pages can't be wrong

[sukotto]

Obviously it's not indexing http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/

estimate that the average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is roughly 11 meters per second, or 24 miles an hour.

what causes cancer?

[umundane]

I learned that

> smoking (387) causes cancer.

I was also surprised to learn that

> girls and women (11) cause most cases of cervical cancer

This is a great resource if you need to cite a reference for a Wikipedia article.

TextRunner confirms it:

[guruevi]

Who is at Area 51
aliens (3), Carter (2), Colonel Sanders (2), Hi Group (2) is at Area 51

Who bombed WTC
Al Qaeda (5), Bush (5), Clinton (2), 4 more... bombed the WTC

Who built the pyramids (example on site):
Egyptians (298), aliens (73), Pharaohs (40), 77 more... built the pyramids

What contains antioxidants (example on site):
Coffee (17), Recent scientific research (15), food (6), 5 more... contain significant amounts of antioxidants

-- man, I gotta get me some more recent scientific research.

Correction....

[wowbagger]

"...that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages."

Correction:

"...that pulls together assertions by combing through more than 500 million Web pages."

Whether those assertions are correct or even reasonable is a completely different issue.

It might be interesting to then take those assertions and have some means to validate or invalidate them, but currently that's going to require meat, not metal.

Now, if you could come up with some form of AI^Walgorithm to do that automatically, then you would have something.