October 20, 2010 – Scientists are trying to find a new way for computers to learn over time and start analyzing information in more human-like ways. A little scary, but sounds a lot like semantic technology to me.
“Read the Web” is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time. NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously since January 2010, attempting to perform two tasks each day. All this work has acquired a knowledge base of nearly 440,000 beliefs that it has read from various web pages.
IT Online brought this news to our attention in their article, “Changing the way computers learn” The inputs to NELL include an initial ontology defining hundreds of categories, as well as some sample deductions. Accuracy from the process continues to improve as researchers continue to be amazed.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
