Natural language research announcements

["Hockenmaier, Julia Constanze" <juliahmr AT illinois.edu>]

From: "Gustafson, Julie" <jdg5 AT illinois.edu>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:20:34 +0000
To: Announce <announce AT cs.illinois.edu>, Clerical <clerical AT cs.illinois.edu>, "MacGregor, Drew" <macgregr AT illinois.edu>, Faculty <faculty AT cs.illinois.edu>, Grads <cs-grads AT cs.illinois.edu>, Postdocs <postdocs AT cs.illinois.edu>, "McElroy, Rhonda Kay" <rmcelroy AT illinois.edu>, "Cimarusti, Scott" <cimarust AT illinois.edu>
Cc: "Coleman, Cynthia Jeanette" <ccoleman AT illinois.edu>
Subject: DLS Speaker - Tom Mitchell - March 26, 2012

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Department of Computer Science

Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science

201 North Goodwin Avenue

Urbana, Illinois 61801-2302 USA

 

Computer Science

Distinguished Lecture Series

 

Never Ending Language Learning

 

 

Guest Speaker: Tom M. Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

Date/time: Monday, March 26, 4pm

Location: 2405 Siebel Center

 

Abstract:

We describe our efforts to build a Never-Ending Language Learner (NELL) that runs 24 hours per day, forever, learning to read the web.  Each day NELL extracts (reads) more facts from the web, and integrates these into its growing knowledge base of beliefs.  Each day NELL also learns to read better than yesterday, enabling it to go back to the text it read yesterday, and extract more facts, more accurately.  NELL has been running 24 hours/day for over two years now. The result so far is a collection of 15 million interconnected beliefs (e.g., served with (coffee, applePie), is A (applePie, baked Good) ), that NELL is considering at different levels of confidence, along with hundreds of thousands of learned phrasings, morphological features, and web page structures that NELL uses to extract beliefs from the web. Track NELL's progress at http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu.

 

 

Bio:

Tom M. Mitchell is the E. Fredkin University Professor and founding head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience.  Mitchell is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow and Past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).  Mitchell believes the field of machine learning will be the fastest growing branch of computer science during the 21st century.  His web page is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom.