Invited talk at the LTsolutions International Workshop in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain on 21st May 2015. More information about the workshop at: http://www.langune.com/home/presentationen/ltsolutions

1. How Watson Works:
A look inside Watson, how it
works and how it is being
applied in business and
society
Keith Cortis
IBM Watson Group,
Dublin Lab, Ireland
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 1

2. CONFIDENTIAL© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 2
Watson and how it
works

3. CONFIDENTIAL
A Grand Challenge Opportunity
On February 14, 2011, IBM Watson changed history . . .
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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4. CONFIDENTIAL
What is Watson?
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
• What Watson is:
−Cognitive system
−Combines information retrieval and natural language processing
(NLP)
−Builds its domain knowledge from sources comprising structured and
unstructured data
−A core set of technologies that can be customised and targeted to
specific industries
• What Watson is not:
−Search engine
−Database system
−Skynet or HAL 900
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5. CONFIDENTIAL
What is Watson?
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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6. CONFIDENTIAL
The Technology behind Watson
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation
DeepQA: Massively Parallel Probabilistic Evidence-Based Architecture
•
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7. CONFIDENTIAL
The Technology behind Watson
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation
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DeepQA: Massively Parallel Probabilistic Evidence-Based Architecture
•

8. CONFIDENTIAL
DeepQA Pipeline
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
Q: In 1894 C.W. Post created his warm cereal drink
Postum in this Michigan city
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9. CONFIDENTIAL
Understands
natural language and
human style
communication
Adapts and learns from
training, interaction,
and outcomes
Generates and
evaluates evidence-
based hypothesis
1 2
3
Watson combines transformational capabilities
to deliver a new world experience
Watson:Watson:
• Understands me
• Engages me
• Learns and improves over
time
• Helps me discover
• Establishes trust
• Has endless capacity for
insights
• Operates in a timely fashion
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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10. CONFIDENTIAL© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 10
Watson in business
and society

11. CONFIDENTIAL
A Brief History of Watson
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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12. CONFIDENTIAL
Watson at Play Watson at Work
Beyond Jeopardy!: A new set of Challenges…
10s of thousands concurrent users
Pages of input (e.g. medical record)
Noisy text with errors and shorthand
Dynamic content ingestion
Supporting evidence integral
Text, tables and images as input
Both Q&A + Conversation model
High security (e.g. HIPAA)
1 User
Max. input was two sentences
Input perfect prose
5+ days to retrain
Evidence not present
Text-only input
Q&A model
Basic security
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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13. CONFIDENTIAL© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
Beyond Jeopardy!: Hardware and Performance Details
2880 Processing
Cores
16 Terabytes
Memory (RAM)
90 IBM P750
Servers
20 Questions / min
(And Now...)
64 Processing Cores
1 IBM P750 Server
512 GB Memory
(RAM)
50 Questions / min
NLP x10 faster
using x50 less RAM
(Then...)
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14. CONFIDENTIAL
IBM Watson Group - 2014
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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15. CONFIDENTIAL
Healthcare is “dying of thirst in an ocean of data”
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
“Medicine has become too
complex. Only about 20% of the
knowledge clinicians use today
is evidence-based.”
Steven Shapiro
Chief Medical & Scientific Officer
University Pittsburgh Medical Centre
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16. CONFIDENTIAL
Financial Services firms face complex information challenges
Reuters publishes the
equivalent of 9000 pages of
financial news every day1
Five new research documents
come out of Wall Street every
minute2
Asset managers receive up
to1,000 e-mails daily3
“The sheer amount of news flow has made it difficult for people to take positions
confidently” 4 -Adam Margolis, Citi trader
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17. CONFIDENTIAL
Watson Engagement Advisor
• Watson as a virtual agent (customer service/advice, sales, support,…)
−Insurance
−Telecommunications
−Banking sector
• Interactive Q&A with Watson
−Responds with weighted confidence
−Active dialog in natural language
−Leverages multiple data sources
−Dynamically ingests new data, learning from user responses and outcomes
−Answers questions and guides users over company data e.g., product
manuals, FAQs, research documents, etc.
−Direct conversation with company’s clients
−Improves client experience and reduce calls
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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18. CONFIDENTIAL
Watson Engagement Advisor
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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More info at: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/engagement_advisor.html

19. CONFIDENTIAL© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 19
Watson in a
multilingual world

20. CONFIDENTIAL
Jeopardy! Watson is English-specific
• English parser
−Rule-based, good quality
• English type system
−Person ->Leader->President
• English Named Entities
−U.S. -> United States
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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21. CONFIDENTIAL
Language Technology Challenges
• Language agnostic Question Answering system
−Easily extensible to other languages
• Parsing Technology:
−Rule-based vs. Statistical Dependency Parsing
• Named Entity Recognition across different languages
• Detection of Concepts across text in multiple languages
• Machine Learning models containing a multilingual focused feature set
• Language sensitive search
• Diacritics handling (e.g. for question analysis, search, etc.)
• Character encoding
• Tokenisation
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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22. CONFIDENTIAL
Language Challenges – Ambiguity and Context
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
Source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jay-hart-girlfriend-striker-sacked-5551762
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23. CONFIDENTIAL
すべての人は、自己の権利及び義務並びに自己に対する刑事責任が決
定されるに当たって、独立の公平な裁判所による公平な公開の審理を受け
ることについて完全に平等の権利を有する。
4-Benzoxazolecarboxylic acid, 5-(methylamino)-2-((3,9,11-trimethyl-8-(1-
methyl-2-oxo-2-(1H-pyrrol-2-yl)ethyl)-1,7-dioxaspiro(5.5)undec-2-
yl)methyl)-, (6S-(6alpha(2S*,3S*),8beta(R*),9beta,11alpha))-
Arbeitsvertragsrechtsanpassungsgesetz ist der …
Language Challenges – Tokenisation
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
23

24. CONFIDENTIAL
すべて の 人は 、 自己 の 権利 及び 義務~並び に 自己
に 対する 刑事~責任 が 決定される に 当たって 、 独立 の
公平 な 裁判所 に よる 公平 な 公開 の 審理 を 受ける こと
に ついて 完全 に 平等 の 権利 を 有する 。
Arbeitsvertragsrechtsanpassungsgesetz ist der …
4-Benzoxazolecarboxylic acid, 5-(methylamino)-2-((3,9,11-trimethyl-8-
(1-methyl-2-oxo-2-(1H-pyrrol-2-yl)ethyl)-1,7-dioxaspiro(5.5)undec-2-
yl)methyl)-, (6S-(6alpha(2S*,3S*),8beta(R*),9beta,11alpha))-
=> calcimycin
Language Challenges – Tokenisation
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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25. CONFIDENTIAL© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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Configure and Train Phase
• Build corpus and ground truth
• Iterative Development
Validation Phase
• Use the system in a real-world environment
Full Production Phase
Mission Statement: Deploy an IBM Watson prototype as a Spanish
natural language question answering system to make it faster and easier
for the selected persona (end user population) to directly answer their
client’s questions on Foreign Trade policies and/or products.
Use-Case: Foreign Trade Domain
First Multilingual Watson Engagement
Major Spanish Retail Bank

26. CONFIDENTIAL
Spanish Bank – Watson Engagement Advisor
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation
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27. CONFIDENTIAL
facebook.com/ibmwatson
ibmwatson.com
@ibmwatson
Find me at:
@kcortis
Learn more at:
linkedin.com/in/keithcortis/
keithcor@ie.ibm.com
© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation