Building a Cognitive Application Using Watson DeepQA

Academic advisors assist students in academic, professional, and personal matters. Successful advising increases applicant yield and student retention, improves graduation rates, and helps students meet educational goals. This work presents a cognitive advising system that answers questions related to a university and its programs. This system uses IBM Watson’s cognitive intelligence to identify the question category and then answer the question accordingly. To implement the system, the authors created a four-step systems development process. Their approach will be used as part of a Cognitive Computing in Business course that exposes student teams with diverse skills and backgrounds to both developing and deploying cognitive systems.