Wednesday, 3 December 2014

Computer equal to or better than humans at cataloging science



A new computer system is better than scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogues the results of thousands of individual studies.

"We demonstrated that the system was no worse than people on all the things we measured, and it was better in some categories," said Christopher Re, who guided the software development for the project while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The development marks a milestone in the quest to rapidly and precisely summarise, collate and index the vast output of scientists around the globe, said first author Shanan Peters, a professor of geoscience at UW-Madison.

Peters and colleagues set up the faceoff between PaleoDeepDive, their new machine reading system, and the human scientists who had manually entered data into the Paleobiology Database.

The study was published in the journal PLoS.

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