IBM has announced a very high profile AI/NLP challenge - it will
develop a system to take on humans at Jeopardy (a very popular game
show here in the USA at least).
What's interesting about this is that the IBM system (named Watson)
will play the game via text. For a company with a long and rich
tradition in speech processing, I find that a rather revealing choice,
and I am certain much will be made of this ("Why can't the bazillion
dollar computer listen and speak??").
Below is a short piece from the BBC on this...the title is a bit harsh
perhaps (calling it a "stunt" :), but make no mistake this is very
much about marketing (in addition to the science part). IBM is a big
player in the supercomputing market, which is quite lucrative and
promises to remain that way for some time to come...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8021774.stm
Machine versus man stunt by IBM
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
The computer company that has in the past taken on the grandmasters of
chess is now turning its attention to the famed trivia quiz show
Jeopardy.
In a head to head challenge of man versus machine, IBM will pit a
supercomputer code-named Watson against human contestants.
Watson is a new question-answering system based on natural language.
"The aim is to get Watson to think and interact in human terms," IBM's
Dr David Ferrucci told BBC News.
"It will try to understand a users question and intent and understand
it at a rudimentary level and provide and accurate and confident
answer."
For the last two years scientists have been working on perfecting the
system that will drive Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J Watson
Snr.
"The most challenging aspect of this is that Watson has to know what
it knows with utmost confidence.
"Otherwise if it buzzes in and gets the answer wrong that is bad on
Jeopardy because you lose money and lose the game," explained Dr
Ferrucci, an IBM artificial intelligence researcher and team leader on
the project.
"New approach"
IBM is no stranger to such high profile stunts.
Back in 1997 a computer called Deep Blue defeated world chess champion
Garry Kasparov in another battle of human versus machine.
To compete at chess, the company built an extremely fast computer that
could calculate 200 million chess moves per second based on a fixed
problem.
This time round, Watson is looking to solve an open-ended problem that
requires an entirely new approach.
To win on the show, contestants need a good knowledge across a range
of topics and the ability to quickly analyse subtle meaning, irony,
riddles and other complexities that humans excel at but computers do
not.
The rules of the game will be slightly modified for this battle.
Watson will be given the questions as electronic text while the human
contestants will both see the text and hear it spoken by the show's
host Alex Trebek.
The computer will answer in a synthesised voice and choose follow up
questions. For the taping of the show, Watson will not be hooked up to
the internet but will only be able to draw from what it has "read", or
processed and indexed, before the show.
"It requires critical thinking. It requires a whole lot more than
knowledge alone," said Jeopardy's executive producer Harry Friedman.
"When people hear about this project, they say isn't this Google on
steroids? No it's not."
IBM and the show's producers are hoping grand champion Ken Jennings to
take part. He won Jeopardy 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52m
(£1.71m) in 2004.
"Ken is the best and no-one gets close to his achievement. This is
just a great test for Watson," said Dr Ferrucci.
"Mapping meaning to meaning"
Behind this effort to put Watson on a big stage and have some fun,
there is a serious business goal.
"This is about giving enterprise faster access to more precise
answers," explained Dr Ferrucci.
"While business might be satisfied with the classic search approach
because it gives you plenty to read, the thing that haunts you when
you are making a decision is what is out there that I am not reading.
"Watson will look at all the information, including the most remote
that might impinge on any answer you might make building more and more
confidence into that content to help support your decision."
IBM's director of research John Kelly said "This represents a new
level of communications between computers and human beings.
"What we are doing is creating a system that will be able to be
applied to all sorts of applications in the world and essentially cut
the time to find answers to very difficult problems."
Dr Ferrucci said that in the past the "human has had to adapt to the
computer working with classic search" and that Watson changes
everything by "getting the computer to work in human terms".
"Rather than mapping words to words which is easy for a computer to
do, it now has to map meaning to meaning and that is a much bigger
challenge."
Here are some additional links with more details from IBM....
http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/index.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e22ufcqfTs
Enjoy,
Ted
--
Ted Pedersen
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
