Introduction to "This is Watson"

In 2007, IBM Research took on the grand challenge of building a computer system that could compete with champions at the game of Jeopardy!™. In 2011, the open-domain question-answering (QA) system, dubbed Watson, beat the two highest ranked players in a nationally televised two-game Jeopardy! match. This paper provides a brief history of the events and ideas that positioned our team to take on the Jeopardy! challenge, build Watson, IBM Watson™, and ultimately triumph. It describes both the nature of the QA challenge represented by Jeopardy! and our overarching technical approach. The main body of this paper provides a narrative of the DeepQA processing pipeline to introduce the articles in this special issue and put them in context of the overall system. Finally, this paper summarizes our main results, describing how the system, as a holistic combination of many diverse algorithmic techniques, performed at champion levels, and it briefly discusses the team's future research plans.

[1]  Burn L. Lewis.  In the game: The interface between Watson and Jeopardy! , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[2]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project , 2010, AI Mag..

[3]  Mark T. Maybury.  New Directions in Question Answering , 2004 .

[4]  D. Swanson.  Fish Oil, Raynaud's Syndrome, and Undiscovered Public Knowledge , 2015, Perspectives in biology and medicine.

[5]  Aditya Kalyanpur,et al.  Automatic knowledge extraction from documents , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[6]  Siddharth Patwardhan,et al.  Structured data and inference in DeepQA , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[7]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  IBM's PIQUANT II in TREC 2004 , 2004, TREC.

[8]  Aditya Kalyanpur,et al.  A framework for merging and ranking of answers in DeepQA , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[9]  Michael C. McCord,et al.  Deep parsing in Watson , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[10]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  Question-answering by predictive annotation , 2000, SIGIR '00.

[11]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Textual resource acquisition and engineering , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[12]  Aditya Kalyanpur,et al.  Typing candidate answers using type coercion , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[13]  Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay,et al.  The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) , 2013 .

[14]  Siddharth Patwardhan,et al.  Fact-based question decomposition in DeepQA , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[15]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Special Questions and techniques , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[16]  Gerhard Weikum,et al.  Robust Disambiguation of Named Entities in Text , 2011, EMNLP.

[17]  Siddharth Patwardhan,et al.  Question analysis: How Watson reads a clue , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[18]  Leonard Bolc,et al.  Natural language question answering systems , 1980 .

[19]  Gerald Tesauro,et al.  Simulation, learning, and optimization techniques in Watson's game strategies , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[20]  John Hale,et al.  A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution , 1998, VLC@COLING/ACL.

[21]  Aditya Kalyanpur,et al.  Leveraging Community-Built Knowledge for Type Coercion in Question Answering , 2011, International Semantic Web Conference.

[22]  Praveen Paritosh,et al.  Freebase: a collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge , 2008, SIGMOD Conference.

[23]  David A. Ferrucci,et al.  Building an example application with the Unstructured Information Management Architecture , 2004, IBM Syst. J..

[24]  James Fan,et al.  Textual evidence gathering and analysis , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[25]  Erik T. Mueller,et al.  Watson: Beyond Jeopardy! , 2013, Artif. Intell..

[26]  Robert F. Simmons,et al.  Computational Linguistics Natural Language Question- Answering Systems: 1969 , 2022 .

[27]  Chang Wang,et al.  Relation extraction and scoring in DeepQA , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[28]  Jens Lehmann,et al.  DBpedia - A crystallization point for the Web of Data , 2009, J. Web Semant..

[29]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[30]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Identifying implicit relationships , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[31]  Gerhard Weikum,et al.  WWW 2007 / Track: Semantic Web Session: Ontologies ABSTRACT YAGO: A Core of Semantic Knowledge , 2022 .

[32]  T. Landauer,et al.  Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis , 1990 .

[33]  Eric W. Brown,et al.  Making Watson fast , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[34]  Sanda M. Harabagiu,et al.  Advances in Open Domain Question Answering (Text, Speech and Language Technology) , 2006 .

[35]  Jian Su,et al.  A Composite Kernel to Extract Relations between Entities with Both Flat and Structured Features , 2006, ACL.

[36]  Jennifer Chu-Carroll,et al.  Finding needles in the haystack: Search and candidate generation , 2012, IBM J. Res. Dev..