MIT's New AI System: How It Learns By Surfing The Internet

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently presented their new artificially intelligent system that can fill the information gap itself by surfing the Internet. During the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, MIT researchers said the AI system has the ability to gather structured information from unstructured machine readable documents automatically. Karthik Nasarimhan, one of the co-authors of the study, said that in order for them to do this, they employed a technique called reinforcement learning where the system learns through the notion of cumulative reward. This technique was based on behavioral psychology and is also used in swarm intelligence, game theory, and genetic algorithms among others. According to Nasarimhan, the technique is necessary because there is a lot of contrasting information out which can cause uncertainty when the data is merged.