IBM, Natural Language PR, and Television
September 13, 2011
I read “IBM and Jeopardy! Relive History with Encore Presentation of Jeopardy!: The IBM Challenge.” Frankly with TV in the summer slump, a reprise of the competition between IBM and humans is not likely to kick off the fall TV season with a bang. Reruns are, in fact, recycled information.
The idea is that on September 12, 13, and 14, 2011, I can watch humans match wits with IBM’s natural language search system, Watson.
Now Watson, based on what I have heard, is quite a lot of Lucene (an open source search system which IBM uses in its OmniFind 9.x product), and an extremely large database of analytics and content. To some degree it is not too different from having Wikipedia on your hard drive with IBM’s highly customized proprietary software.
To make Watson work, IBM needed three key ingredients: (a) very large systems – ninety IBM Power 750 servers with four 8-core processors each (2880 cores total!), (b) numerous engineers from the IBM R&D Labs, and (c) an army of technicians to baby sit the machine and database. Watson does not understand spoken speech, but like the computer on my desk, Watson can accept typed inputs. Watson also does not work from my iPad or my mobile phone.
While it is a solid achievement and nice step forward for Natural Language, the reality is that Watson is pretty much a raw demo from the R&D labs, and the Jeopardy! angle is an expensive and somewhat amusing marketing play. Not many Jeopardy! watchers are going to license IBM’s natural language processing technology. A better question is, “How many Jeopardy! watchers know what natural language processing is anyway?”
The problem for me is that television is not the real world. Reality shows are loosely scripted. When I see a commercial television production, the operative word is postproduction. The video wizards snip and segue to make the talent and the floor personnel, the writers, the sound team, the videographers, and the teleprompter operator fuse as a seamless whole.
But let’s look at Watson’s impact in the commercial software world. Jeopardy! is a show and the Watson system and content is highly customized to the show. In applying Watson to the real world, I personally have some doubts about how “smart” Watson is. Watson has potential but clearly needs much more work to prove it can be applied to everyday business problems due to the immaturity of the technology and the tremendously high cost of the systems and the databases involved.
Here’s the snippet from the news story I saw on Wednesday, August 31, 2011, a slow news day:
Six months after the original competition, Watson’s Deep Question Answering (QA) technology has already driven progress in new fields such as the healthcare industry. IBM is working with Nuance Communications, Inc. to explore and develop applications to help critical decision makers, such as physicians and nurses, process large volumes of health information in order to deliver quicker and more accurate patient diagnoses. Working with universities and clients, IBM is identifying many potential uses for Watson’s underlying QA technology. The technology underlying Watson analyzes the structure and wording of the question or challenge being investigated, and formulates an answer that it has the highest level of ‘confidence’ is correct. Watson answers ‘natural language’ questions, which can contain puns, slang, jargon and acronyms that must all be evaluated as part of Watson’s confidence in returning an answer.
Contrast this with a real-world natural language processing system. We just examined the EasyAsk system, which is now in use at such well known companies as Netsuite, SugarCRM, and dozens of online eCommerce sites, including Coldwater Creek and Lands End. Let me highlight several points of difference.
First, EasyAsk’s NLP technology processes human inputs, makes sense of them, and returns on point results. Watson is a TV game show demonstration.
Second, EasyAsk’s system supports a broad range of real world implementations. These include, but are not limited to, eCommerce, business intelligence, and enterprise search. Meanwhile Watson does medical as a demonstration and game shows as a demonstration. EasyAsk is used in hundreds of real customer applications today by thousands of business professionals and Internet shoppers.
Think ease of use, reliability, and stability. A platoon of technicians is needed for Watson. EasyAsk gets installed and is ready to go. After installing EasyAsk for Netsuite or SugarCRM you can ask questions out of the box like “Show Opportunities to Close this Quarter > $100,000” and get an immediate answer. EasyAsk just works.
Third, economical scalability is a key in today’s big data environment. Watson scales, but you need to buy the expensive and proprietary IBM POWER7 servers. EasyAsk runs on the same type of standard hardware that is found in most companies’ data centers and hosting providers’ facilities.
Why am I comparing a giant $100 billion dollar a year consulting firm’s approach to natural language processing with EasyAsk? I suppose the staging of the television demo caught my attention, but the rerun underscored the desperate lengths to which a giant company must go to convince a game show audience that it is a technology leader.
EasyAsk is a David. IBM clearly is a Goliath with too much money and a skewed sense of what it takes to get paying customers. I will bet $1.00 on the category “Silly Marketing Ideas”. If the answer is “This big firm uses TV to prove it is a technology leader.” I’ll go with “What is IBM?”
EasyAsk just makes sales with a product that incorporates advanced technology to deliver results.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
