A machine-learning system that trains itself by surfing the web

MIT researchers have designed a new machine-learning system that can learn by itself to extract text information for statistical analysis when available data is scarce. This new "information extraction" system turns machine learning on its head. It works like humans do. When we run out of data in a study (say, differentiating between fake and real news), we simply search the Internet for more data, and then we piece the new data together to make sense out of it all. That differs from most machine-learning systems, which are fed as many training examples as possible to increase the chances that the system will be able to handle difficult problems by looking for patterns compared to training data.