IBM Watson and NLP: Marketing or Solution?
August 27, 2011
Watson, the IBM supercomputer, cause quite a stir earlier this year when it swept through the Jeopardy playing field, winning round after round handedly. On a more technical level, Watson may have greater implications for how unstructured data is tackled in search. Brian McKenna’s interview with Craig Rhinehart at IBM, “Watson’s natural language processing takes crack at unstructured data,” tells us more.
Craig Rhinehart said:
We think of it (Watson) as a breakthrough in computing. Unstructured information and communicating in natural language have not been well-adopted in IT terms. This technology will enable new ways to interact with computers, opening up new solutions. Natural language is very ambiguous, as opposed to data, where a five is always a five . . . In natural language, we speak in riddles, abbreviations, with pop culture references . . . But 80% plus of our information is unstructured, and we are expecting 44 times growth more in the next 10 years.
The problems encountered by natural language processing are numerous and no one seems to have a perfect solution for how to tackle all of them at once. Watson itself made an embarrassing move once or twice on Jeopardy, when it seemed to misunderstand a question. Considering the overall success that Watson had in interpreting colloquial language, it is a major breakthrough. Are we to believe that Watson is also responsible for introducing the concept of natural language processing to everyday Americans?
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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