Watson Goes Open Source…Not Really

January 2, 2015

IBM’s Watson is becoming a new natural language processing analytical tool. It is doubtful that IBM will ever expose Watson’s guts to the open source community, but parts of its internal software organs were designed around existing open source work. Also do not doubt the open source community’s resourcefulness. The community is already building their own Watson-like entities. InfoWorld lists these open source projects on “Watson Wannabes: 4 Open Source Projects For Machine Intelligence.”

DARPA DeepDive is an automated system for classifying unstructured data that emulates Watosn’s decision-making process with human guidance. Christopher Re of the University of Wisconsin, developed it.

Apache Unstructured Information Management (UIMA) is a program that was actually used to program Watson. It is a standard for performing analysis on textual content. IBM UIMA architecture is available via the open source Apache Foundation. It is not a complete machine learning system and only offers the minimum code to build on.

OpenCog’s goal is to build a platform for developers to build and share artificial intelligence programs. OpenCog wants to help create intelligent systems that have humanlike world understanding rather than being focused on one specific area. OpenCog is already using NLP, making it a practical solution similar to Watson.

The Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems (OAQA) is more akin to Watson than the other three. It offers an advanced question and answering system-using NLP. IBM and Carnegie Mellon University started it. OAQA is only a toolkit, not a downloadable solution.

“The one major drawback to each project, as you can guess, is that they’re not offered in nearly as refined or polished a package as Watson. Whereas Watson is designed to be used immediately in a business context, these are raw toolkits that require heavy lifting. Plus, Watson’s services have already been pre-trained with a curated body of real-world data. With these systems, you’ll have to supply the data sources, which may prove to be a far bigger project than the programming itself.”

All too true.

Whitney Grace, January 02, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Natural language processing, News

Comments

One Response to “Watson Goes Open Source…Not Really”

formuscle.net on January 3rd, 2015 3:45 pm

formuscle.net

Watson Goes Open Source…Not Really : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.