WHY IBMS WATSON COMPUTER IS IMPORTANT
(Posted 2011-02-17 09:55:21 by Ray Lopez)

Yesterday, IBMs computer named Watson beat two human competitors in a 3-day
Jeopardy TV show contest.  All in all, Watson did very well, minus a few
glaring mistakes (such as mistaking Toronto for a city in the U.S.).

Many of the comments online and in the news were of the "so what?" variety.
 These commentaries are generally about the fact that Watson is a massive,
powerful computer, and, duh, it should be good at quickly answering trivia
questions.

These types of comments miss the point entirely about Watson.  Watson's
biggest achievement is the fact that the front end is able to parse English
with no help from humans.  Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the
biggest and most complex areas in computer science.  The holy grail of NLP
is the ability to correctly understand English, with all of its bizarre
rules, puns, poems, insults, sarcasm, irony, and clever twists of phrasing.
 If you are a native English speaker, understanding all of these things is
something you do automatically.  This is because our brains contain the
built-in functionality necessary to learn and understand language. 
Programming such understanding into a computer has always been a challenge,
one that we haven't done so well.  Until now.

So yes, Watson is a big deal.  Not because of the ability to quickly answer
trivia questions, but because of its ability to take natural language and
use that natural language input to drive its searches.  

Watson's technology is still a very long way from being used by regular
folks.  And the technology still has a long way to go, because Watson can't
actually hear human English, it is just able to respond to typed input. 
But once those problems are solved, we will have a platform that can be
used in a very wide variety of settings, including help desks, financial
advice, medical diagnoses, mental health, law enforcement, and a host of
other areas.  

Keep watching what IBM does in this area.  As a former IBMer I am very
proud of the accomplishments of this company, and look forward to hearing
more and more about the developments coming out of IBM Research.  

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