ウェブページから意味を汲みとるセマンティック学習システムNELL

アメリカのDARPAとグーグルからの援助を受けカーネギーメロン大学で開発中の人工知能NELLは、人の助けを借りずに自主的にウェブページから人間のように意味を汲みとってどんどん学習していくシステム。最初に人間によって簡単なカテゴリー分けをしてあげた後、ウェブ上に放たれて24時間休みなく学習していく。他のセマンティック学習システムが人間のプログラマーの手が入るのに対してNELLは勝手に学習していくのが新しい点となっている。

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University ― supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo ― has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer ― calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week ― that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.
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Still, artificial intelligence experts agree that the Carnegie Mellon approach is innovative. Many semantic learning systems, they note, are more passive learners, largely hand-crafted by human programmers, while NELL is highly automated. “What’s exciting and significant about it is the continuous learning, as if NELL is exercising curiosity on its own, with little human help,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, who leads a project called TextRunner, which reads the Web to extract facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/05compute.html
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/huixing/20090623/textrunner