Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages 138
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?"
Try the query.... (Score:4, Funny)
Nascent AI? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll start stockpiling food and armor piercing rounds for the moment Skynet goes live.
500 million web pages can't be wrong (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Retrieved 0 results for what is the answer to life, the universe and everything?.
Re:Not entirely helpful (Score:5, Funny)
So much like Wikipedia then?
Re:500 million web pages can't be wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously it's not indexing http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/ [style.org]
what causes cancer? (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.
TextRunner confirms it: (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Not entirely helpful (Score:3, Funny)
it just repeats what other people have said
I don't see anything new here, most people have done this since the beginning of time.
Yeah, Textrunner just repeats what other people have said, like most people since the beginning of time.
Re:Exactly (Score:2, Funny)
"The query "Who killed JFK?" suggests the CIA did it"
Hmmm....And now its not responding because its "slashdotted"
Re:Try the query.... (Score:3, Funny)
I tried to read your comment, but I did not attempt to understand it.
Retrieved 1 result for does god exist (Score:2, Funny)
Well, that answers that question.