- IBM recently announced several new Watson technologies designed for helping organizations understand and analyze complex topics
IBM recently announced several new Watson technologies designed to help organizations identify, understand, and analyze some of the most challenging aspects of the English language with greater clarity and insights. These new features are considered the first commercialization of key Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to come from IBM Research’s Project Debater.
There is a new advanced sentiment analysis feature defined to identify and analyze idioms and colloquialisms for the first time. So it can recognize phrases such as “hardly helpful” or “hot under the collar.” Phrases like those have been challenging for artificial intelligence systems since they are difficult for algorithms to spot. And with advanced sentiment analysis, businesses can begin analyzing such language data with Watson APIs for a more holistic understanding of their operations. Plus IBM is bringing technology from IBM Research for understanding business documents like PDFs and contracts.
“Language is a tool for expressing thought and opinion, as much as it is a tool for information,” said Rob Thomas, General Manager of IBM Data and AI. “This is why we’re harvesting technology from Project Debater and integrating it into Watson – to enable businesses to capture, analyze, and understand more from human language and start to transform how they utilize intellectual capital that’s codified in data.”
IBM recently announced its plans to integrate Project Debater technologies into Watson throughout the year with a focus on advancing clients’ ability to exploit natural language. For example, IBM is integrating Project Debater technologies into Watson throughout the year with a focus on advancing clients’ ability for exploiting natural language. The enhanced sentiment analysis will be built into Watson Natural Language Understanding this month.
And IBM also recently unveiled a new classification technology that will enable clients to create AI models that can more easily classify clauses that occur in business documents such as procurement contracts. With Project Debater’s deep learning-based classification technology, the new capability can learn from as few as several hundred samples to do new classifications quickly and easily. This is planned to be added to Watson Discovery later this year.
There is a new Summarization feature, which can pull textual data from a variety of sources to provide users with a summary of what is being said and written about a particular topic. An early version of Summarization was utilized at The GRAMMYS this year to analyze over 18 million articles, blogs, and bios to produce bite-sized insights on hundreds of GRAMMY artists and celebrities. This data was linked to the red carpet live stream and on-demand videos and photos across www.grammy.com. The Summarization technology will be added to IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding later in the year.
Another feature that was added to IBM Watson is Advanced Topic Clustering. This builds on insights gained from Project Debater as new topic clustering techniques will enable users to “cluster” incoming data to create meaningful “topics” of related information to be analyzed. This technique will be integrated into Watson Discovery later this year and it will allow subject matter experts to customize and fine-tune the topics to reflect the language of specific businesses or industries like insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing.
ESPN Fantasy Football Using Watson
ESPN Fantasy Football utilizes Watson Discovery and Watson Knowledge Studio to analyze millions of football data sources each day during the season to offer millions of fantasy football players real-time insights. And by processing natural language, Watson identifies the tone and sentiment of news articles, blogs, forums, rankings, projections, podcasts, and tweets that cover everything from locker room insights to injury analysis.
ESPN Fantasy Football surfaces these insights in player cards that snapshot the “boom” and “bust” potential of each player along with the “Player Buzz” section that summarizes the positive or negative commentary about a player.
KPMG Using Watson
Financial and accounting services giant had worked with IBM for creating an artificial intelligence solution based on several Watson services like Watson Natural Language Understanding. And this technology makes it more effective for companies to identify, claim and retain potential R&D income tax credits.
In development by KPMG, the solution can help clients increase the amount of R&D income tax credits the company captures since Watson is able to review more documentation quickly while minimizing disruption to the client’s business.
Over the past year, KPMG clients have seen more potential for R&D tax credits with some projects even seeing over a 1000% increase in the number of documents reviewed. Plus the solution helps clients uncover more potential activities that qualify for additional income tax credits while reducing business disruption.
The Debater Film
To showcase the power of Watson, IBM recently launched the trailer for “The Debater,” which shows the behind-the-scenes of the making of Project Debater through the perspective of a team of researchers pushing to take artificial intelligence into uncharted territory. Here is the trailer:
