Meet NELL, the Computer That Learns From the Net 272
bossanovalithium writes "Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet.
According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out.
NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day."
What no spelling? (Score:3, Interesting)
Lears? Really?
Re:Project Page (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet it will tell us that the elephant population has recently quadrupled. Seriously... I know people who seem to have been educated solely from the internet and it's not something to aspire to.
Sounds very human. (Score:3, Interesting)
Very human indeed. Has it found God yet?
Useful, in a way (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's useful, in a way, for inspiration when writing poetry. When you get stuck, you can look at what Nell has found that relates to your subject. Say, you need help with gentle breeze [cmu.edu]. You come up with things like "flowers dancing on", or "whispering through". It's like getting all the short-range literary tricks without doing any reading. By short-range I mean it cannot pick up yet on any sort of a longer story built on your topic, but can see interesting word-strings in the short neighborhood of your topic. It seems to pick on word plays, parallels, and such.
Reality meets fiction - sci-fi refs (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, everyone got the Skynet reference which is probably the most well-known and recent and involves computers attempting to destroy humanity (bad computers!).
But how many of you have ever heard of "The Adolescence of P-1" by Thomas J. Ryan. School hacker codes up a cracker tool, gets expelled, improves it, and lets it loose where it gets out of hand. Humans then attempt to destroy now-intelligent and self-protective software program. (bad software! - nice read)
Or even earlier, "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner. Epic hackers creating worms (bad society! - good, but overreaction to the Nixon years)
Or how about when humans actually *want* to turn over the world to a computer, as in "Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. They test the concept by installing it in a space station and then attacking it just to be sure they can turn it off if they really want to (bad idea! - but good book and Hogan at his best)
Those last three were all written in the 70's. Others can likely lengthen this list considerably.
Re:It's lacking the most basic cognitive functions (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of trying to get NELL to "un-learn" something, I would see if weighted metrics could be applied to multiple tags for an individual record. As the "learning" progressed the weights would favor a particular categorization, but others would still be on record.
So Klingons as an "Ethnic Group" would end up with a lower metric than Klingons as a "Fictional Alien Species" or "Humanoids" or "animal with bilateral symmetry", etc..
The weighting mechanism could be as simple as an integer hit count in NELL's matching logic. I couldn't get to the article to read the details so I would guess that the code operates as a neural network at some level, so allowing the creation of weighted links should be do-able.