MIT's New AI Data Extraction System Teaches Itself by Surfing the Web - The New Stack

We live in an age where there is a vast, over-abundance of data available on the web. The problem is that sifting through all of it to find and make sense of whatever is deemed relevant is an incredibly time-consuming task. But it may soon become easier, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently revealed in a paper that introduces a new artificial intelligence system that would be capable of learning, on its own, in extracting useful information from online sources. Recently presented at the conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing in Austin, the researchers' paper describes a new information extraction system that's able to automatically extract structured information from unstructured machine-readable documents. Put simply, the program can do what humans are good at: When faced with a gap in information or something we don't understand, we go and search for another document to digest that will add to our understanding or further our knowledge.