It’s tempting to think IBM’s Jeopardy-playing machine Watson must have relied on some huge algorithmic advance or silver bullet idea in order to beat top human Jeopardy players. But the researchers behind Watson have written a very interesting paper about how Watson works, and a different picture emerges. It’s not that they found any super-algorithm… Continue reading Using evaluation to improve our question-answering system
Month: June 2012
How to answer a question: a simple system
In 2011, IBM got a lot of publicity when it demonstrated a computer named Watson, which was designed to answer questions on the game show Jeopardy. Watson was good enough to be competitive with (and ultimately better than) some of the best ever Jeopardy players. Playing Jeopardy perhaps seems like a frivolous task, and it’s… Continue reading How to answer a question: a simple system