Computer Science Colloquium, 2005-2006

Oren Etzioni
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
March 15th, 2006

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google

For the last quarter century (measured in person years), the KnowItAll project has focused on accumulating massive amounts of information from the Web by utilizing domain-independent, fully automated techniques. If successful, this effort has the potential to address the long-standing "Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck" in Artificial Intelligence, and enable a new generation of search engines that extract and synthesize information from text to answer complex user queries. This talk will describe the evolution of the KnowItAll family of systems (or is it Intelligent Design?) culminating in TextRunner---a program that has extracted over 1,000,000,000 "facts" from the Web without breaking a sweat.


Shuly Wintner
Last modified: Tue Feb 14 09:31:02 IST 2006