How IBM Watson uses NLP

For our March meetup event, we are delighted to be joined by Chris Phipps (https://twitter.com/lousylinguist) & colleagues from the IBM Watson (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/) team for a presentation on natural language processing in Watson.

In February 2011, IBM Watson defeated Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in the Jeopardy! Challenge. Today, Watson is a cognitive system that enables a new partnership between people and computers that enhances and scales human expertise by providing a more natural relationship between the human and the computer.

One part of Watson’s cognitive computing platform is Question Answering. The main objective of QA is to analyze natural language questions and present concise answers with supporting evidence, rather than a list of possibly relevant documents like internet search engines.

This talk will describe some of the natural language processing components that go into just three of the basic stages of IBM Watson’s Question Answering pipeline:

• Question Analysis

• Hypothesis Generation

• Semantic Types

The NLP components that help make this happen include a full syntactic parse, entity and relationship extraction, semantic tagging, co-reference, automatic frame discovery, and many others. This talk will discuss how sophisticated linguistic resources allow Watson to achieve true question answering functionality.

************************

We'll meet at 6:30pm in the upstairs bar at Stetsons near the intersection of 16th and U Streets NW in Adams Morgan. Introductions & announcements will start around 7:00pm, and presentations will begin at 7:30pm. Afterwards, there will be plenty of time for follow-up questions, networking, and drinks.

Please note: Stetsons is a 21 and over venue.

DC NLP meets on the second Wednesday of each month to network, socialize, and learn about the interesting work folks are doing in natural language processing, computational linguistics, text analytics, and more.

Do you have something you'd like to share with the group? Let us know! We're always looking for speakers to give talks at future meetups, and don't forget to follow @DCNLP (https://twitter.com/DCNLP/) on Twitter!