Behind Google Q&A

Peter Norvig gave a talk at UC Berkeley on September 25. Among other things, he talked about some Google projects that use artificial intelligence. He also said that a large corpus of data can be much more valuable than an efficient algorithm. One example of project where Google uses a lot of data is Google Q&A, that is extracting facts from web pages and delivering as answers to common questions like "what is the population of Japan?". Google doesn't use predefined patterns, they find the patterns from examples, as this approach is more scalable. They extract data by matching the patterns against the top results for a query.

The presentation is available online (MMS stream).