i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 Human Jeopardy contestants impress me, but a computer that can give similar responses, in as little time, would really amaze me.  "Watson" needs to interpret clues, process information quickly, and give correct answers.  It's that first bit that falls into Natural Language Processing, which we'll be discussing in 202.  

I have faith in IBM's ability to gather a vast amount of trivia in preparation for Question Answering (or "answer questioning," I guess it would be in the Jeopardy! world), tag the data points in every way imaginable, and have a lightening fast retrieval system are all imaginable feats.  Will Watson really be able to correctly understand the nuances of language and infer the correct data being sought?   The computer is still in development so we won't know how for some time.  One sidebar is that Watson will receive his cues as electronic text.  I assume that means IBM and Jeopardy! have agreed to skip questions that would have shown images or video or played music samples.  It also means Watson will not be responding to or attempting to interpret any vocal cues.  While that shouldn't affect this effectiveness as a Jeopardy! contestant since Trebek's question delivery is not part of the question, it does mean Watson is one layer further removed from natural interaction (that - and he is going to miss out on an iconic part of the true Jeopardy! experience).  But IBM already has a full enough plate with (first-generation?) Watson.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/27jeopardy.html