Researchers from the US have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that surfs the internet, extracts information from the available plain text and organises it for quantitative analysis in very less time. Recently at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory won a best-paper award for a new approach to information extraction that turns conventional machine learning on its head. Most machine-learning systems work by combing through training examples and looking for patterns that correspond to classifications provided by human annotators. In their new paper, the MIT researchers trained their system on scanty data -- because in the scenario they're investigating, that's usually all that's available. But then they find the limited information an easy problem to solve.