Slashdot points to an article describing how artificial intelligence scholars at Technion, the Israeli technical university, are using Wikipedia to give computers an understanding of the world. The researchers, according to the article, “have found a way to give computers encyclopedic knowledge of the world to help them ‘think smarter,’ making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does … The program devised by the Technion researchers helps computers map single words and larger fragments of text to a database of concepts built from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia … The Wikipedia-based concepts act as ‘background knowledge’ to help computers figure out [meaning].” I knew it. In the end, we’re all going to end up working for Wikipedia.
If memory server, some years back AT&T did similar work using the Canadian parliament as a corpus. Should we have read anything into that?
This sounds like Project Halo. At the Wikipedia article is says:However, the effort cost $10,000 per page and a detailed failure analysis indicated that the prime reason for system failure was the lack of chemistry understanding on the part of the knowledge engineers who formulated the text.. So I guess this system will be really good at playing Calvinball.