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Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages

Posted by kdawson on from the data-mining-gone-large dept.

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?"

2 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Not entirely helpful by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. what causes cancer? by umundane · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.