Yes, Watson, an Accurate Description
February 22, 2015
I noted a post in the Atlantic. The article is “IBM’s Watson Memorized the Entire Urban Dictionary, Then His Overlords Had to Delete It.” I am not sure how a machine memorizes, but that is an issue for another day. The point is that Watson responded to one researcher’s query with a one word curse. Key point: Watson is supposed to do marvelous smart things. Without context, Watson is more likely to perform just like any other Lucene and home brew script system. Here’s the passage I noted because it underscores the time and expense of making a unicorn work just like a real animal:
Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query. Ultimately, Brown’s 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory.
IBM, you never fail to entertain me.
Stephen E Arnold, February 22, 2015
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