E. Fredkin University Professor
Chair, Machine Learning Department
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

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., servedWtih(coffee, applePie), isA(applePie, bakedGood) ), that NELL is considering at different levels of confidence, along with hundreds of thousands of learned phrasings, morphoogical 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.