Artificial-Intelligence System Surfs Web to Improve Its Performance

Callison-Burch's group is using a combination of natural-language processing and human review to build a database of information on gun violence, much like the one that the MIT researchers' system was trained to produce. "We've crawled millions and millions of news articles, and then we pick out ones that the text classifier thinks are related to gun violence, and then we have humans start doing information extraction manually," he says. "Having a model like Regina's that would allow us to predict whether or not this article corresponded to one that we've already annotated would be a huge time savings. It's something that I'd be very excited to do in the future."