Smart Computer

Computer science researchers at the Haifa, Technion-Israel Faculty of Computer Science have discovered a method for giving computers the type of knowledge that can make them think in a human-like manner “think smarter,” making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does. This new type of computer knowledge can enable the machines to better filter junk emails (spam), make more efficient searches of the information highway, and even gather intelligence in a more sophisticated manner than previous computer programs.

Computers can calculate how many times specific words will occur within two texts, and this helps them look smarter than they are within the parameters of a web search or an email filtering program. The computers don’t have any actual understanding of the text. The machine can only see the words as a collection of matching symbols, and has no real understanding of the sense of the words themselves.

Researchers used a concepts database they created with online encyclopedia Wikipedia as their prototype. The database of concepts also aims to teach computers to distinguish between amorphous terms like “mouse” which sometimes refers to an animal and at other times to a computer device. The method also helps computers figure out ambiguous terms. This can be especially important in translated documents.

Most Web search and e-mail filter programs appear smart by calculating how often certain words appear in two texts, but what is common to all these applications is that the programs that actually do this kind of thing don’t understand text. They treat text as a collection of words, but they don’t understand the meaning of words. For example an email filter may be configured to block messages containing the word “vitamin,” but emails containing the word “B12″ will continue to flow into one’s inbox. The program has no inkling that B12 is a type of vitamin. The Technion researcher said, “With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that “B12″ is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam.

About Technion Faculty of Computer Science

The program devised by the Technion researchers helps computers map single words and larger fragments of text to a database of concepts built from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which has over one million articles in its English-language version. The Wikipedia-based concepts act as “background knowledge” to help computers figure out the meaning of the text entered into a Web search, for instance. Giving computers this deeper knowledge has been a long-standing problem in artificial intelligence.

In the near future, the Technion researchers hope to improve their method by adding information from the Web page links inside Wikipedia articles. They are already pursuing a patent on their work, which they say will be of interest to the intelligence community and Web search engine companies, among others.

Technion Faculty of Computer Science is Israel’s leading science and technology university. Home to the country’s winners of the Nobel Prize in science, it commands a worldwide reputation for its pioneering work in nanotechnology, biotechnology, water-resource management, materials engineering, aerospace and medicine and computer science.