Lt solutions workshop_ibmwatson_keith

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

CONFIDENTIAL © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 2

Watson and how it works

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A Grand Challenge Opportunity

On February 14, 2011, IBM Watson changed history . . .

© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation

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What is Watson?


• 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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What is Watson?


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The Technology behind Watson


DeepQA: Massively Parallel Probabilistic Evidence-Based Architecture

•

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The Technology behind Watson


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DeepQA: Massively Parallel Probabilistic Evidence-Based Architecture

•

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DeepQA Pipeline


Q: In 1894 C.W. Post created his warm cereal drink

Postum in this Michigan city

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Understands

natural language and

human style

communication

Adapts and learns from

training, interaction,

and outcomes

Generates and

evaluates evidence-

based hypothesis

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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


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Watson in business and society

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A Brief History of Watson


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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


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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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IBM Watson Group - 2014


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Healthcare is “dying of thirst in an ocean of data”


“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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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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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


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Watson Engagement Advisor


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More info at: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/engagement_advisor.html


Watson in a multilingual world

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Jeopardy! Watson is English-specific

• English parser

−Rule-based, good quality

• English type system

−Person ->Leader->President

• English Named Entities

−U.S. -> United States


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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


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Language Challenges – Ambiguity and Context


Source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jay-hart-girlfriend-striker-sacked-5551762

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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


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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


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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

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Spanish Bank – Watson Engagement Advisor


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facebook.com/ibmwatson

ibmwatson.com

@ibmwatson

Find me at:

@kcortis

Learn more at:

linkedin.com/in/keithcortis/

[email protected]
