[Intelligence Seminar] April 20: Oren Etzioni, GHC 4303, 3:30, "Machine Reading at Web Scale"

[Noah A Smith]

Intelligence Seminar

Tuesday, April 20, 2010
3:30pm
GHC 4303

Title:  Machine Reading at Web Scale
Oren Etzioni, University of Washington
Host:  Tom Mitchell
Please contact Sharon Cavlovich (sharonw at cs.cmu.edu) to request a meeting.

Abstract:

How can AI research utilize the Web?  My talk describes an ambitious
effort to address AI's "Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck" via
self-supervised understanding of text.  Instead of delving into short,
complex texts, we scale shallow understanding to billions of
sentences.  This scale up has enabled us to investigate the "dark
matter of the Web"---common sense knowledge that is implicit in the
Web corpus.  I will illustrate our progress with an LDA-based method
for identifying the selectional preferences of relations at an
unprecedented scale.

Bio:

Oren Etzioni received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in
January 1991, and joined the University of Washington's faculty in
February 1991, where he is now the Washington Research Foundation
Entrepreneurship Professor of Computer Science.  Etzioni received a
National Young Investigator Award in 1993, and was selected as a AAAI
Fellow a decade later.  In 2007, he received the Robert S. Engelmore
Memorial Award.  He is the founder and director of the University of
Washington's Turing Center.  Etzioni is the founder of Farecast, Inc.,
which was sold to Microsoft in 2008, and became the foundation for
Bing Travel.