Nigh-magical is the word indeed. I just realized that if my insane idea in the grandparent were made to work, it could be unleashed upon all research publications ever everywhere for mining data, figures, estimates, etc., and then output a giant belief network of “this is collective-human-science’s current best guess for fact / figure / value / statistic X”.
That does not sound like something that could be achieved by a developer less than google-sized. It also fails all of my incredulity and sanity checks.
(it also sounds like an awesome startup idea, whatever that means)
Or IBM-sized. But if you confined your ambitions to analyzing just meta-analyses, it would be much more doable. The narrower the domain, the better AI/NLP works, remember. There’s some remarkable examples of what you can do in machine-reading a narrow domain and extracting meaningful scientific data; one of them is ChemicalTagger (demo), reading chemistry papers describing synthesis processes and extracting the process (although it has serious problems getting papers to use). I bet you could get a lot out of reading meta-analyses—there’s a good summary just in the forest plot used in almost every meta-analysis.
Nigh-magical is the word indeed. I just realized that if my insane idea in the grandparent were made to work, it could be unleashed upon all research publications ever everywhere for mining data, figures, estimates, etc., and then output a giant belief network of “this is collective-human-science’s current best guess for fact / figure / value / statistic X”.
That does not sound like something that could be achieved by a developer less than google-sized. It also fails all of my incredulity and sanity checks.
(it also sounds like an awesome startup idea, whatever that means)
Or IBM-sized. But if you confined your ambitions to analyzing just meta-analyses, it would be much more doable. The narrower the domain, the better AI/NLP works, remember. There’s some remarkable examples of what you can do in machine-reading a narrow domain and extracting meaningful scientific data; one of them is ChemicalTagger (demo), reading chemistry papers describing synthesis processes and extracting the process (although it has serious problems getting papers to use). I bet you could get a lot out of reading meta-analyses—there’s a good summary just in the forest plot used in almost every meta-analysis.