IBM: A Leader in Following?
March 16, 2020
DarkCyber spotted “IBM Prepares To Advance Watson’s Language Ability.” The story appeared in Capital FM, an online publication in Nairobi. That’s okay. What’s interesting is that IBM has announced “the first commercialization of key Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to come from IBM Research’s Project Debater, the only AI system capable of debating humans on complex topics.”
What’s new, aside from the Kenya coverage? Here’s a sampling of the technologies that will allegedly make Watson a superhero: Natural language processing. Watson will understand sentiment which can “identify and analyze idioms and colloquialisms for the first time.” [Emphasis added]
Plus:
IBM is bringing technology from IBM Research for understanding business documents, such as PDF’s and contracts, to also add to their AI models.
Where’s the technology originate? Project Debater. There’s also “deep learning based classification which
can learn from as few as several hundred samples to do new classifications quickly and easily. It will be added to Watson Discovery later this year.
Also, there’s another innovation:
It will also exploit natural language through Clustering or Advanced Topic Clustering. Building on insights gained from Project Debater, new topic clustering techniques will enable users to “cluster” incoming data to create meaningful “topics” of related information, which can then be analyzed.
Okay, let’s step back. NLP, quick deep learning, clustering, and the other technologies. My recollection is:
- IBM’s Dharmendra Modha was writing about text clustering in “Large Scale Parallel Data Mining” which is about a decade after the Endeca crowd fired up their functional facets for “Guided Navigation”. Now this clustering is coming to IBM Watson. What?
- In 2003 IBM researchers filed a patent application for “US7130777, Method to hierarchical pooling of opinions from multiple sources.” Now Watson is doing what commercial vendors have been offering for many years; for example, Lexalytics in 2003. Not exactly a text book case of using home grown technology or emulating a competitor, is it?
- And NLP dates back to 1993 and the work of Vincent Stanford, Ora Williamson, Elton Sherwin, and Frank Castellucci. See US5615296. These are IBM professionals. And 1993 was more than a quarter century ago.
Net net: Kenya, Watson, and technologies that have been around for decades are part of IBM’s preparations to add functions to Watson. “Prepares”, year, pretty speedy.
Watson? What are you doing? Maybe DarkCyber should ask Alexa?
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2020
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