Opine

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed
comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and
“mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites
force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0
system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right
hotel for a particular user.
“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificialintelligence
researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is
the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”

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