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These sorts of endeavors are usually doomed by vague thinking (see most of AI research in the 70s and 80s). However, I've read a few of Mitchell's papers-- he'

These sorts of endeavors are usually doomed by vague thinking (see most of AI research in the 70s and 80s). However, I've read a few of Mitchell's papers-- he's a really good researcher and his involvement makes me more curious. Also, I'm impressed that the NY Times linked directly to a paper* on NELL--- I wish more articles did that. * = http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/papers/carlson-aaai10.pdf http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/papers/carlson-aaai10.pdf

alextp 16y ago
The article is full of hype but nell is a serious project. Tom Mitchell is one of the pioneers of machine learning as a field, and there's still interesting research coming from his lab. Information extraction is not a new thing, and even unsupervised information extraction has more than one competing approach, although obviously none of them solves "the real problem". NELL attempts to do unsupervised information extraction over time, correcting itself as it goes. How successful it can be depends fundamentally on the algorithms behind it (and I'm not familiar with them), but given the state of the technology the most likely thign to happen is what they describe in the paper, which is having a huge database with a ridiculously unimaginable number of true relations in it but also a bigger-than-you'd-like number of plain ridiculously false relations. It's definitely not something that can solve AI.
- kermit_de_fro 16y ago
  I'm going to blatantly ignore most of your post and just ramble about solving AI. I don't put much stock in the idea of a surprising, monolithic "solution" to AI being discovered. If the past 30-40 years are any indication, AI will continue to slowly encompass harder and harder tasks until one day we stop having easy ways of distinguishing it from whatever we consider intelligence. They used to say chess was too hard for computers. Then they said computers couldn't do anything but pure logic. Then it was that they couldn't do reasoning unless it was directly programmed in. What will be left in another 10 years?

alextp 16y ago

The article is full of hype but nell is a serious project. Tom Mitchell is one of the pioneers of machine learning as a field, and there's still interesting research coming from his lab. Information extraction is not a new thing, and even unsupervised information extraction has more than one competing approach, although obviously none of them solves "the real problem". NELL attempts to do unsupervised information extraction over time, correcting itself as it goes. How successful it can be depends fundamentally on the algorithms behind it (and I'm not familiar with them), but given the state of the technology the most likely thign to happen is what they describe in the paper, which is having a huge database with a ridiculously unimaginable number of true relations in it but also a bigger-than-you'd-like number of plain ridiculously false relations. It's definitely not something that can solve AI.

kermit_de_fro 16y ago
I'm going to blatantly ignore most of your post and just ramble about solving AI. I don't put much stock in the idea of a surprising, monolithic "solution" to AI being discovered. If the past 30-40 years are any indication, AI will continue to slowly encompass harder and harder tasks until one day we stop having easy ways of distinguishing it from whatever we consider intelligence. They used to say chess was too hard for computers. Then they said computers couldn't do anything but pure logic. Then it was that they couldn't do reasoning unless it was directly programmed in. What will be left in another 10 years?