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CMU Web-Scraping Learns English, One Word At a Time

Posted by timothy on from the hao-ubowt-hahmnimz dept.

blee37 writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a web-scraping AI program that never dies. It runs continuously, extracting information from the web and using that information to learn more about the English language. The idea is for a never ending learner like this to one day be able to become conversant in the English language." It's not that the program couldn't stop running; the idea is that there's no fixed end-point. Rather, its progress in categorizing complex word relationships is the object of the research. See also CMU's "Read the Web" research project site.

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Uh oh... by hampton · · Score: 5, Funny

    What happens when it discovers lolcats?

    1. Re:Uh oh... by Bragador · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, it reminds me of a chatbot named Bucket. When people at 4chan heard of it, they started to use it and teach it. It became a complete mess filled with memes, bad jokes, racists comments, and everything you can think of.

      http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Bucket

      One response from the bot:

      Bucket: I don't know what the fuck you just said, little kid, but you're special man. You reached out and touched my heart. I'm gonna give you up, never gonna make you cry, never gonna run around and desert you, never gonna let you down, never gonna let you down, never gonna make you cry, never gonna let me down?

      The quality of the teachers is important when learning.

  2. Will be this article read by that program? by nereid666 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am the the Carnie Mellon reader, I have discovered with this article that I am robot.

    --
    Damia
  3. Re:Finally, people are getting AI right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You're advocating the "emergent intelligence" model of AI, where intelligence "somehow" is created by the confluence of lots of data. This has been a dream since the concept of AI started and is the basis for numerous movies with an AI topic. In practice the degrees of freedom which unstructured data provides far exceed the capability of current (and likely future) computers. It is not how natural intelligence works either: The structure of neural networks is very specifically adapted to their "purpose". They only learn within these structural parameters. Depending on your choice of religion, the structure is the result of divine intervention or millions of years of chance and evolution. When building AI systems, the problem has always been to find the appropriate structure or features. What has increased is the complexity of the features that we can feed into AI systems, which also increases the degrees of freedom for a particular AI system, but those are still not "free" learning machines.