Google Tech Talks November 11, 2008 ABSTRACT Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be best solved by a bootstrapping method: creating enough structured data to motivate the development of applications. We believe that autonomously `Semantifying Wikipedia’ is the best way to bootstrap. We choose Wikipedia as an initial data source, because it is comprehensive, high-quality, modestly sized, and contains enough manually-derived structure to bootstrap an autonomous, self-supervised process. In this talk I will present our success to date in this endeavor: A novel approach for self-supervised learning of CRF information extractors Automatic construction of a comprehensive ontology via statistical-relational learning Vast improvements in extraction recall through shrinkage over this ontology and retraining The stimulation of a virtuous feedback cycle between communal content creation and information extraction We aim to construct a knowledge base of outstanding size to support inference, automatic question answering, faceted browsing, and potentially to bootstrap the Semantic Web. Speaker: Daniel S. Weld Daniel S. Weld is Thomas J. Cable / WRF Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. After formative education at Phillips Academy, he received bachelor’s degrees in both Computer Science and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1982. He landed a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab …
